I’ve gotten sucked into mobile games before. What I can’t figure out is why I haven’t hit a wall yet. I can listen to podcasts, talk with my wife, and still get the endorphin hits and skin-of-my-teeth, come-from-behind wins that a great gaming experience delivers. It’s just as easy to dip in and play for 45 seconds between meetings-or during a recovery interval on a Peloton ride-as it is to spend 30 minutes on a Sunday afternoon engaging in a massive “boss event” alongside my alliance. So what if I’ve spent around what a console game costs? I’ve gotten far, far more time and enjoyment out of it. I haven’t bought a pair of sneakers in a year. I’ve left the house like seven times since March. Each character has a suite of three powers peculiar to them: Some are passive, laying out special tiles that can compound damage or shield a character from enemy damage others can shift tiles around, destroy groups of tiles, or send characters airborne to escape damage. For each round, you put together a team of three Marvel Comics characters selected from your roster. But they’re also the only similarities, because the joy and magic of MPQ is the role-playing game that’s built on top of the match-3 mechanic. Those similarities are exactly why my wife loves calling it Candy Crush Avengers. If you match four or five tiles contiguously, you do more damage and can destroy a row or even get an extra turn.

The game’s core mechanic is absolutely the same: You’ve got a board filled with tiles of various colors and shapes, any of which can be slid to swap places with any tile above, below, or next to it if you make a line of three like tiles, they disappear, and the tiles above drop in to fill the void. And the first one is probably “ Wait, a match-3 puzzler? Like Candy Crush?” Yes, exactly.

Marvel puzzle quest best characters