Platform: Android, iOS, Xbox One, Windows Phone It’s as addictive to play as it is to collect dragons. There are over 700 dragons to discover, and with fusion making that number go into the thousands. You cultivate a team of colour-coded monsters, mating and evolving them so that they can accompany you on your perilous journeys. Puzzle and Dragons is like an RPG crossed with Candy Crush, making you match-three at the same time as solving puzzles and collecting the titular dragons. It’s strangely familiar, but mixing up the genre at the same time – both for the match-three genre and Pokémon itself. The more you battle, the more Pokémon you have in your pocket to use for future battles. Match three (or more) of the same Pokémon together to dish out an attack on the opposing critter. It melds the battling concept of a classic Pokémon RPG, but with a match-three gameplay strategy. There might not be an official Pokémon RPG on the App Store (and Pokémon Go isn’t quite what we wanted either), but Pokémon Shuffle Mobile is a good compromise. Gameplay-wise, it’s as you’d expect, with a few small twists but essentially a fairly straightforward match-three experience. Featuring characters, environments and scenarios plucked straight from the tentacles of the TV show, it manages to channel all the hilarity and high-jinx you’d expect despite the match-three constraints. If you’re looking for a Candy Crush alternatives with a TV tie-in, then Futurama: Game of Drones is a great option. What’s more, the freemium model is never intrusive, and just leaves you to get dot madness. Later on additional win requirements gets added, but the overall gameplay mechanics stay the same – and stay utterly compelling. But if you really want to win at Two Dots, you need to create a square of dots to clear all those of the same colour across the board. You get presented with a board full of coloured dots, and as long as you create a line connecting at least two of them you clear them from the board (and drop new ones of course). Technically Two Dots is more of a match-four game than a match-three. There are a few lurking on the app stores in more recent years, but we’d suggest Bejeweled Blitz is the best for the modern match-three era. Created back in 2001 for browsers, it’s the game that inspired the entire match-three genre, with its colourful jewels, classic gameplay and sparkling graphics. There couldn’t be a list suggesting alternatives to Candy Crush without featuring the game’s original source material: Bejeweled.

Free app games like candy crush