Apps to bust your boredom

by Nikkita Dixon

We’ve all been there. Sitting on a long train ride home, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, standing in an elevator full of people or in some cases (as we’ve learnt recently) sitting on the toilet. You pull out your phone, you take a few swipes across your screen, scanning for those little red numbers to show an update of some sort. You check your Facebook, Twitter and email at the speed of light before realising you’re just plain bored.

In these situations it helps to have some time-wasting apps at the ready. I’ve compiled some of the most popular boredom-busting apps to see you through to something a little more interesting. Check it out:

Line up
This one will take you back to the good old days of playing Tetris on your Gameboy. Lineup is essentially the same thing. You get blocks of varying shapes falling from the top of the screen and you line them up along the bottom of the screen to form a solid foundation. Nostalgia anyone?

BubbleFREE
A surprisingly addictive but simple game where you’re presented with a sheet of bubble wrap on your screen. Your mission is to pop as many bubbles as possible within a certain period of time. Here’s a top tip from an avid player – lay the phone on a flat surface and use both hands and all of your fingers to pop the bubbles. It’s much more effective.

Words with friends
Words With friends is kind of like MSN or Skype, but you play Scrabble (or a variation of it) with your friends while you chat. Or you can just play Scrabble and forget the chat as most people tend to do. Just like the old-school game, you make your way through a batch of letters and create words to earn yourself points. This one went through a popular phase in our communications team with staff interrupting the occasional meeting with “that’s not a real word!”.

Paper toss
This game was responsible for the random disappearance of my phone for hours at a time before my boyfriend managed to buy his own smartphone. The surprisingly addictive game requires you to yep, you guessed it – test your skills at tossing paper. You line up your shot (compensating for that pesky fan that’s bent on sending your shot astray) and toss your balled up piece of paper into a wastepaper basket.

Angry Birds Lite
Angry Birds has become quite the phenomenon recently, now with its own line of merchandise, but you can still get your hands on the ‘Lite’ version for free. Better yet, the latest update of the Lite app includes six new levels that aren’t available in the full version. Smashing things with angry-looking birds has never been so much fun. It’s simple, it’s cute and it requires a level of skill so you’ll be playing it for hours.

Horoscopes
If you’re into that kind of thing, this app will kill at least five minutes on a daily basis. The app loads a new horoscope every day along with weekly, monthly and overall predictions for your future. You also have similar ‘lovescopes’ which give you the goss on your future relationships. Even better is the ‘tarot card’ button which lets you tap the screen to select three tarot cards, then gives you an entire outline of your upcoming day based on the cards. I’m not a firm believer of those things, but it’s a time killer nonetheless.

Ice Cream Maker
Probably the simplest app of all, Ice Cream Maker gives you all of the ingredients to make your own ice cream sundae. First you pick your plate, table setting and background; then you can put together your sundae from a variety of different ice creams, toppings and garnishes. The only problem is it leaves you with a killer craving for ice cream.

Of course these are just a few in the ocean of apps floating around. Feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments.

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