Playing puzzles on a phone requires nothing at all, which is the appeal. But if you play on trains, in waiting rooms and during storm outages, a small number of things genuinely improve it — and a much larger number of things are sold for the purpose and do not.
The four that earn a place
- A power bank, 10,000 mAh. Bright screens and constant redrawing empty a battery faster than most people expect. Ten thousand is roughly two full phone charges and is the largest capacity that still fits comfortably in a jacket pocket. Anything bigger stays home and therefore helps nobody.
- One good cable, long enough. Two metres beats one, because a short cable puts tension on the connector every time the phone moves. Braided sleeve, proper strain relief, and matched to your phone's connector.
- A microfibre cloth. A smeared screen makes a busy board unreadable, and a shirt is the wrong material — it grinds dust across the glass and wears the fingerprint-resistant coating.
- Somewhere to put them. Loose cables tangle around everything else in a bag and connectors collect grit. This is a small problem that a five-dollar pouch solves permanently, which is the entire reason we ended up selling one.
What does not earn a place
- Clip-on controllers. Excellent for action games, useless for anything played by tapping a grid.
- Cooling fans that clamp to a phone. A puzzle game does not generate the heat that justifies one. Take the case off instead.
- Styluses. Match-3 is played with broad quick gestures; a fine tip makes it slower and no more accurate.
- A second phone as a dedicated games device. Tempting, and it always ends up flat in a drawer.
On the pouch, honestly
It is a felt bag with a zip. There is nothing clever about it and it is not made by hand — it is sourced, checked and posted by one person. It costs $15.00 AUD because that is what it costs to buy, pack and send from Darwin with a small margin, and if you already own a pencil case that works, use that instead.
What it does is stop a cable, a cloth and a power bank from living loose in the bottom of a bag. That is the whole product claim, and it is a real one.