Description:
Those long plane trips will melt away as you hunch over your hand-held computer popping away at Bubblets. This tiny, addictive game from Casio Soft is so simple you'd think you could master it in five minutes and move on to something else, but the strategy and long-term thinking required will challenge a chess master. Start with an array of different-colored (for CE) or designed (for Palm) circles and find matched sets to remove. It's child's play until you see that the bubbles on top fall if you choose to remove the ones underneath, often changing the whole field before you realize what you've done. Scoring is based on how many of the little guys you remove at once, so it's important to go for the big sets--but not at the expense of a bad late-game position. If you see that you got greedy and flubbed a great play, just undo your last move and breathe a sigh of relief, though hard-core strategists will scoff at this lack of foresight. Try not to let Bubblets get in the way of your expense reporting or e-mail, though--the boss might not appreciate all the time you spend on "strategic planning." --Rob Lightner
| 
