$3 Buys You A Ticket To Puzzle Heaven

It isn't new, but it's the hotness in my pocket. Drop7 was introduced to me in Cologne by Street Fighter's Seth Killian, and I can't stop playing this iPhone puzzler.

Drop7 is part Sudoku and part Tetris. You've got all the time in the world to make your decisions, but you'll need it -- cracking the high score board requires pulling off strategies dozens of moves in the making.

Each turn, you drop a single orb onto the playing field. If that makes any orb(s) on the board part of a continuous row or column that matches its number, those orbs disappear and any above them fall down to take their places. Any new matches then pop the appropriate orbs, causing higher orbs to fall, and so on. The points you score increase geometrically for creating these chains, so the first match(es) in a chain give a mere 7 points while later matches can give over 200 points apiece.

Every so often (starting out at 20+ turns and gradually coming faster and faster), a row of gray orbs pushes up from the bottom. These sealed orbs need to be opened up by having two adjacent orbs pop, either at the same time or during later turns. Cracking these sealed orbs is a central mechanic, since you can't remove them until they've been opened up and having your board fill up is the game's loss condition.

I'm pretty decent at puzzle games, and my (slowly increasing) average 150k score doesn't make me feel too shabby. Currently, the top score on the normal mode leaderboards is over 700,000, and there are dozens of players whose average scores are in the 400k range. Drop7 has layers of strategy that I haven't even guessed at yet, and I've been playing it nonstop since Gamescom. For $3, you can't go wrong.