Format: iPhone, Android, Flash
Developer: Area/Code
Direct App Store link

This late in the day, the internet hardly needs another article about how good Drop7 is. Yes, it's certainly the greatest thing to ever emerge from an ARG; yes, it’s probably the best game on the iPhone; yes, it's possibly the finest puzzler since Alexey Pajitnov started hacking around on a computer back at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

That comparison to Tetris – and it’s always lurking nearby whenever Drop7 is mentioned – is actually pretty illuminating, too. It’s not just that both games are about falling blocks (in Drop7, your job is to match the number on a disk to the number of disks in its current row or column – but that, genuinely, is just the beginning).

It’s not just that it's sparse but attractive, either, or that the true ramifications of the game mechanics unfold in devilish interlocking spirals of understanding. It’s more about the social side – the way you evangelise Drop7 to other people. There’s always a sense, as with Tetris, that you're not teaching friends the rules to a new game so much as training them to do something they're going to spend quite a lot of the rest of their lives doing.

Much like Bono, Drop7 just keeps giving, too. The latest lure for me – dragging me back to a £1.79 game I’ve already put upwards of 30 hours into – is this: average score statistics. Keeping track of not just your hi-scores but your average performance overall isn’t just another example of Drop7’s general maths literacy, it’s a singular spark of devious brilliance that takes the appeal of a leaderboard – a device which traditionally needs at least two participants to truly work its magic – and turns it into something that works perfectly for motivating a single player. Thanks to those ever-calculating averages, with Drop7, you compete against yourself, each new breakthrough taking that magical figure higher, while each disaster - and there will always be disasters - brings it crashing back to earth again.

It’s not a new feature, I just hadn’t noticed it before. Its effect, however, has been transformative. Average score monitoring has given my game the same kind of throughline tension I got from watching the last series of The Sopranos. Drop7 has become dramatic, unbearable, boiling-point gaming. Each playthrough has become an episode in a longer story - and they almost all end with cliff-hangers.