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Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters, iPhone

Galcon for iPhone - Time Waster

The single greatest procristination tool I've run across in the past couple of months is an iPhone game called Galcon. It's a deviously simple space battle that can take anywhere from 9 seconds to 5 minutes. The object is to send ships from your home planet out into the galaxy to conquer your opponent's planets. The number on each planet tells you how many ships you need to conquer it, and the size of the planet's icon tells you how fast it will produce new ships for you.

The strategy of the game takes a few tries to get the hang of, but once you know how to play, replaying each randomly-generated map to get a faster time becomes totally addictive.The short timespan of a game of Galcon, combined with the game's multiple difficulty levels, makes it hard to play just one game at a time. The Lite version of Galcon is free, but there's also an upgrade that introduces 4 additional mission types and an online multiplayer mode. I'm afraid to download it, because I might never put my iPod down again.

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Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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