Puzzle

Animal Puzzle for Kids - by Play Toddlers for iPhone and iPad is a fun app filled with up to 24 animal jigsaw puzzles. The puzzles are very simple and clearly targeted toward young children. You can choose the difficulty of the level (number of pieces) based on the skill of your child. Animal Puzzle is not only adorable, but a lot of fun and if you play with you kids, you can teach them about animals and the sounds they make at the same time!

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Trainyard for iPhone combines simplistic graphics and design with puzzles that are not so simple. The concept of the game is to get all the trains into the correct stations without a collision. The first several levels will teach you the basics but after that, you'll definitely be scratching your head.

[iTunes Link]

Zentomino for iPhone is an easy to play puzzle game and a great time killer. While the game may have a simple concept, some of the puzzles are not as simple to solve. To complete a puzzle, you'll take Tetris-like pieces and fit them inside the puzzle designs without overlapping or going outside the boundaries. Drag pieces out of their places or back in, tap them while on the board to rotate them. Sometimes you'll use all the pieces allotted to you, sometimes you won't.

[iTunes Link]

I love me some crossword puzzles. You can keep your silly Sudoku, I played enough logic games getting my philosophy major from a department that didn't go for them crazy postmodern language games (seriously, the folks at St. Thomas love them some logic). I love having crosswords on my smartphone because it's the perfect 'quick game' app: you can spend two minutes or twenty on them, there's many new and free ones available every day, and they fend off cognitive decline in old age (Seriously, speaking of Catholics, look into the "nun study").

Anyway, point is I want my crossword puzzle app to be awesome. So this week's App vs. App is crosswords. Today's contestants: 2 Across (1.2.2) by Eliza Block and Crosswords (1.13) by Stand Alone, Inc. Which one will better serve your word-puzzle fetish? Read on!