Last week, Google started a new collection promotion on the Play Store featuring games that you can play while your phone or tablet are offline. This feature comes in handy if you are in an area with a spotty reception (train, rural areas, etc) or if you don’t want to drain the battery life of your device while the screen is already on constantly for the game. There are 30 games in that collection, but we have hand-picked 5 great ones that should satisfy any gaming style.

For the Puzzle lover: Dots

If you have a few minutes to kill while waiting for your doctor’s appointment or for your coffee order to be done, and you don’t mind giving that grey matter in your brain a little run for its money, then Dots is a fun yet challenging puzzle game. In it, you are presented with a grid of colorful dots and you have to connect as many same colored ones as possible in 60 seconds.

It sounds easy until you realize that you score higher if you create longer chains and you start strategizing your next moves a few steps ahead. But beware, Dots is addictive, so you may want to make sure you can turn the game off when your short break is over.

Download: Dots: A Game About Connecting

For the Racing lover: Asphalt 8: Airborne

Jonesing for that adrenaline rush? Asphalt 8: Airborne might be the solution. It mixes realistic landscapes and settings, beautiful and incredibly fast cars, with challenging opponents, car pirouettes and gravity-defying jumps.

Asphalt 8 is great for a short race, but you’ll find more reward if you invest long-term in the Career mode where you start small and slow, but through races and challenges, earn yourself better cars and expensive mods.

Download: Asphalt 8: Airborne

For the Arcade lover: Freeze!

Freeze! is a physics/puzzle arcade that plunges you deep into a dark and enchanting world where the hero, a little eyeball, is stuck in a dangerous maze. You don’t control him, but his world, and so in order to help him escape, you have to turn the maze around, and hence switch the gravity for him to fall inside the maze, then stop the time — Freeze! get it? — and turn the maze again.

It starts simple, then the mazes get more perilous and you have to master precise timing and turns to get the little eyeball out of its spooky, spooky world.

Download: Freeze!

For the Sim lover: Smurfs’ Village

If you’re a fan of The Sims but always wished the characters were blue, unique, and lived inside an Amanita muscaria mushroom, then Smurfs’ Village is for you. In it, you can create your own village by building houses and maintaining gardens. Like any simulation game, there are waiting periods while your crops grow and you can harvest them, and there are challenges and prizes that help you earn in-game money and purchase more items.

Smurfs’ Village is the kind of game that you invest time in at first, then pick up once or twice a day to push your village further along. It’s perfect if you are a commuter and have some regularly scheduled minutes to kill on a train or bus every day.

Download: Smurfs’ Village

For the Sandbox lover: Minecraft – Pocket Edition

Casual gamers, look away, Minecraft isn’t for you! This game is a time sinkhole, and an addictive one at that. In this sandbox game, you use blocks to build things and create your own environment, then you go on adventures inside caves, villages, and biomes.

Minecraft is designed in an 8-bit style, so the more you play it, the more you start seeing the real world around you as blocks piled on top of each other — a funny and weird side-effect. But it’s this kind of spell-binding involvement that shows how compulsive, different, and mind-bending Minecraft is.

Download: Minecraft – Pocket Edition

What are your favorite offline Android games? Leave a comment to let us know.

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