DUWA Arcade

DUWA is three arcade games you play with the people actually in the room. One of you starts a room. Everyone else taps Join and picks it off the list. The phones find each other over the wifi you're already on and talk to each other directly. THE GAMES SNAKE — two to four of you in one arena. Eat, grow, don't crash. Last one still moving wins, and running into someone else's tail counts. BLOKS — head to head. Every line you clear dumps junk on your rival's side. Six pieces, eight columns, and one five-cell piece that will ruin a tidy stack. PADDLE — one ball, two paddles, first to eleven. Where the ball lands on your bat sets the angle it leaves at, so rallies get sharper the longer they run. ON YOUR OWN Nobody around? Play any of the three against DUWA itself. Three settings: CHILL makes mistakes and is a fair first go, NORMAL plays a decent game and punishes sloppiness, and BRUTAL does not miss much. Your best score for each game is kept on your phone and nowhere else. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO There's no account and no sign-in. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is stored anywhere but your own phone. DUWA makes no internet connections at all — it only talks to the phones beside it, which is why it keeps working on a plane, in a jeepney, or anywhere the signal has given up. To play together you do all need to be on the same wifi. Some cafe and hotel networks keep devices from seeing each other, and on one of those the phones can't find each other. A personal hotspot is the usual way around it. Playing on your own needs no network at all. Free, with no ads and nothing to buy. Duwa is Cebuano for play.