| IMG's Top Ten Casual Games for the Mac July 27, 2006 | Marcus Albers |
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A casual game can be loosely classified as a game, generally a puzzle game of some sort, that takes very little time to learn and get into, generally requires a limited skill set, and can be very addicting.
Arguably the earliest example of the casual game is the venerable Microsoft Windows classic Solitaire. Next in the lineage would be the grand-daddy of all puzzle games, Tetris. These games exemplify the best aspects of a casual game, and are some of the mileposts that other casual games are continually measured by.
The Mac is a comparatively new player in the casual gaming scene, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some real bang-up games available. Let's take a casual stroll through the land of gaming for the non-hard core gamer.
This title is one of the only officially licensed Tetris games available for the Macintosh, which is the main reason this title makes it on the list. Although it isn't the best of the Tetris games released, it is a kick to play, and still quite addictive after all these years.
Building on the classic Tetris formula, Elements throws in different gameplay variations based on the elements of nature. Earthquake Tetris brings the fun of Tetris Cascade to the Mac, while throwing in the added element of tremors that will drastically change the game board when they strike. Tempest is one of the harder variations, forcing you to play two separate Tetris boards. The raging storm switches the player between the boards, and it is up to the player to hold key pieces to get the maximum points from each board. Stratosphere, Fire, and Ice round out the game modes, each bringing an interesting twist to the classic game.
Unfortunately, as fun as Tetris Elements is, it suffers from a common malady found in early casual games on the Macintosh. In order to keep it cross-platform, the developers ignore the advanced graphics available on the Mac, and instead seem satisfied with simple Flash graphics and play mechanics. Luckily, game developers soon learned their lesson.
Super GameHouse Solitaire includes ten variations of the classic solo time-waster. The games chosen for this volume are fairly popular, including variants such as Klondike, Pyramid, Tri-Peaks, Golf, and all-time favorite Free Cell. The selection certainly isn't as large as some solitaire games available for the Macintosh, but I think that is what helps to qualify this as a true casual game. By selecting a smaller number of popular, easy-to-grasp variants, you can attract a much larger audience. And if the large number of solitaire games following this one from GameHouse is any indication, they have been able to attract a large audience.
Super GameHouse Solitaire is available from Macgamestore here.
If you haven't heard of Bejeweled, then you have chosen to completely ignore the casual gaming genre. Much like any popular original game, Bejeweled has been cloned and referenced more than nearly any other game in the genre. This is due not only to the popularity of the original, but to the simplicity of the concept: swap jewels on the board to create lines of at least three like-colored gems. Once created, the matches disappear, allowing more gems to flow in from the top of the screen.This was one of the first games that I played that made me completely lose track of the time as I was playing. Before I knew it, I was 20 rounds in and out an hour of my life. To this day, I find it hard to put the game down once I start. This alone is enough of a reason for the game to take the number eight spot in the list. As a genre-defining game, this one will go down in the history books, as well.
Bejeweled is available from Macgamestore here.
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The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?
There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.
GeForce Now
PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.
For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!
The Wine Project
The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.
Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.
As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.
You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.
Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.
CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.
My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.
Boxer
If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.
With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.
Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.
Some final thoughts
In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.
Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
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