oking for fun things to do on your phone this weekend? Our latest Five to Try column is all about entertaining apps— they’re not all games. Miracle Merchant leads this week’s offering, as the inventive single-player card game impresses with its clever mechanics charming h-drawn aesthetic.
Meanwhile, Stardust is a new platform for sharing your hot takes about movies TV shows, ntaya is a new steaming service focused on Spanish-language films. so, Adventure e Run injects a bit of Cartoon Network fun into the endless sprinting formula, Samsung’s Game ve makes it easy to broadcast any Android game to top live steaming sites.
Miracle Merchant
ke most physical card games, many digital card games are meant to be multiplayer experiences—like last week’s The Elder Scrolls: gends the similar Hearthstone: Heroes of rcraft. But Miracle Merchant is more akin to solitaire in that it’s meant to be a single-player card game, it’s a pretty inventive one at that.
Miracle Merchant puts you in the role of a budding alchemist, tasked with creating potions based on the needs of your potential customers. th their cues, you’ll align four cards from your decks to make the best possible potion. The cards you choose how you arrange them affects the ultimate result, so there’s a fair amount of strategy baked into its simple concept.
Games only last a few minutes apiece, so you can squeeze them in easily during your day— the free download lets you play the core game as much as you’d like without paying. If you want to spend $2, however, you’ll open up additional features, such as a book of potions to guide your creations, additional tasks, a daily play mode.
Stardust
Ever watched a movie or TV show immediately thought, “I really need to tell the world how I feel about this”—but then didn’t have the right outlet for that? ll, Stardust hopes to be your destination the next time you want to share your views. The Snapchat Stories-inspired app lets users post video reactions to movies specific episodes of TV shows for everyone else to watch.
Stardust lets you browse Instagram-esque profile pages to see other users’ reactions follow them if you please. The network just launched so it doesn’t have a very large community just yet. In fact, many of the reactions I’ve seen came from actual Stardust employees. But if you need to speak your mind about Game of Thrones or Dunkirk want to see other people’s visceral, immediate reactions, then this might be the app for you.
Adventure e Run
There’s no shortage of Adventure e-themed games on the ay Store, from Card rs Kingdom to Ski Safari: Adventure e Adventure e zzle Quest, but apparently that’s not enough to hit peak saturation. Maybe Adventure e Run will do the trick. This behind-the-back endless runner has you guiding Finn, ke, incess Bubblegum, other beloved characters from the Cartoon Network series as you attempt to notch your highest score.
Unsurprisingly, it’s not the most original game out there. It’s most strongly inspired by Subway Surfers with its three-lane approach familiar obstacles patterns, although it does shake things up here there with combat sequences towards-the-camera chases. And if you love the show, then you’ll appreciate this themed take—just be warned that it’s a strongly freemium experience with various currency types in play.
ntaya
unched this week by film studio onsgate, ntaya is a streaming movie service with a very specific mate: Everything here is in Spanish. ntaya brings together a fair amount of Spanish-language content, from animated films comedies to dramas romance flicks— even some Hollywood picks, like Dirty cing Crank, redubbed for this audience.
A subscription to ntaya is available for $6 per month, you can access it on an array of platforms: not only Android, but also iOS, Roku devices, via Amazon ime, through a web browser. You can freely browse the Android app to get a look at what’s available, opt into a one-week free trial if you decide to give it a shot.
Samsung Game ve
As competitive mobile gaming grows with esports draws like Hearthstone, Vainglory, Clash Royale, there’s naturally more of an interest in streaming mobile games as well. Twitch recently added mobile streaming to its own Android app, but Samsung’s new Game ve app—which only works with Galaxy devices—aims to be a one-app option for streaming footage to a trio of top services.
Game ve works with Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, it simplifies the process of getting your stream up running. You can pick any installed game from within the app, then choose options like which audio will stream out, whether you’ll include video of yourself from the front-facing camera. It’s a hy tool for Samsung fans who crave an audience while they game.