Category Jump?? From Dice Match to 2048

I like to find a style of game app and then look at similar games to see the range of possibilities.  Since Halloween is totally dead this year, I thought I should look through my phone and tablet for apps I have not mentioned on the blog yet.

I gathered up some dice matching app games back in late 2023 to early 2024.  In these, you get one or two dice per round and can place them on the grid (rotating the two dice first if needed).  Typically, three 1s becomes a two and so on up to the three 7s which disappear and free up some room.  If you run out of space, game over.

Those are all very simple, but they are good for short breaks at work.  Some I found are:

Seven Dots, by Funvent Studios

Dice Craft

And this one simply called Merge. 

In the App Store it's "Dice Merge" by Staple Games.  It last updated 30 Aug 2024.  I saw no difference from the previous version.  It's very basic, time to drop it.

Most of these look like hobby projects, not slick commercial games, but I like hobbyists and I find the dice merge style entertaining enough.    I was uninstalling games from my phone last night and saw that I had one more dice merge game called Merge X3 that I never did get a screenshot of.  App Store: "Merge X3", also by Funvent Studios -- it looks like they put out a variety of simple tile match games.  This one is the most "slick" of the group.  I ran it one last time to check for any updates, and had a little surprise.

When I originally downloaded this one, it was just another dice match game.  I even had a game in progress where I had a few 7s on the board.  I was surprised to see those 7s turn into 8s, and then ... 16 and 32, which means ...

... they turned it into a "2048" game.  Loading the new version 3, the devs announced a complete overhaul of how the game worked, and they were not kidding.  After about 15 minutes I was up to the 32K tile.  It last updated Oct 29, just two days ago.  Version 3.1.15.

The tiles started off looking like dice.  Clearly dice.  As you unlock new tiles, old tiles drop out of play, and now it is 100% a 2048 game, no more dice visible.  I can't think of another case of a game jumping categories like that.

Anyway, back to those dice merge apps.  There are a lot more of these, from Dices Merge to "Dice Puzzle - Merge Puzzle" and "Dice Puzzle - Numbers Game" and "Smart Dice Merge - Block Puzzle".  They look 90% the same.  Oddly, many of these seem to have the same exact "Dice Merge" banner.  I don't know what's going on there.  They might all be from the same small puzzle farm.  (Interesting to think that "puzzle farm" is a thing.  I sometimes wish I had one of those.)

This is a good candidate for building a hobby app of your own.  I could see myself building one.  After all, way back in Windows 3.1 days, I did some expanded Minesweeper shareware games.  Not everything has to be complicated.  Some of these lesser-known apps from small developers are just fine for some tap time.

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