Depends on what your definition of “good” and “free” is. If “free” means no money down and also no ads then I’d recommend Unciv. I think it’s quite good.
What type of game are you looking for? I’ll always recommend Shattered Pixel Dungeon for turn based roguelike.
I think the only genre I don’t enjoy is platformers
I’ll give shattered pixel dungeon a try
Recently became aware of Minedustry. Looks interesting.
I don’t play on mobile, but I (and a bunch of my family) have sunk a ton of time into this game. It’s great. Very deep and engaging. It is still being updated by the dev, and is on multiple platforms.
Also some games I tend to install on every device I own are:
Crossword Puzzles by Redstone Games… good puzzles, simple Ui, minimal ads
Simon Tatham’s Puzzles by Chris Boyle… excellent port of many classic logic puzzles, no ads
250+ Solitaires by Alexei Anoshenko… many great solitaire games, minimal ads
PySolFC has over 1000 solitaire games, no ads, and is open source.
And it looks like it’s on F-Droid, excellent!
FWIW my favorite game in it is Imperial Trump Yukon. I can win about 1 in 3 games, but have to work for it.
I use Forkyz for crossword puzzles. It downloads from lots of sources and has a pretty clean interface. No ads.
Polytopia
Seconded. Polytopia is free and was extremely addicting when I first began. Kept me busy whole flight to Japan because you can play it offline too.
When i have 5 minutes to burn on a commute, I play chess puzzles on lichess.
Hoplite
Pixel Dungeon
For a chill puzzle game, I’ve been enjoying the water sort puzzle from Martin Kunze. I like that version specifically because there’s no ads, no monetization, no data collection, no login, no nothing. You just sort colored water until it stops being fun.
Simon Tathams puzzles. Its available on f-droid.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles/
Sword of Convallaria, it’s a gacha game, but the gacha is probably least intrusive i ever seen in similar games, and it actually have entire story mode that you can play for free with barely even engaging in main mode since it have separate character pools. It’s also heavily modelled after Final Fantasy Tactics and imo managed to keep the vibes and feeling better than any other similar game.
Xeonjia, It’s on fdroid.
Underhand is a nice little resource management game.
Im surprised no one had mentioned Fallout Shelter. Its the only mobile I’ve played other then angry birds.
Unciv. Basically civ V on mobile.
It’s very questionable in terms of copyright, though
