A store listing answers most of the questions people send us, and it does it before you install anything. Five fields carry nearly all of the useful information. This is what each one means on an Australian Google Play or App Store page.
1. Age rating
Australian listings show a rating from the relevant classification system for each store. It is not a difficulty label. A 12+ or 9+ rating on a puzzle game usually reflects the presence of advertising, chat or simulated themes rather than anything in the gameplay. Of the games we cover, ratings range from 4+ to 12+ for boards that play almost identically.
2. Contains ads and offers in-app purchases
These two labels are separate, and a game can carry both, one or neither. In our current table, 3 of 5 titles are labelled as containing ads. A game with no ads label is not therefore free of costs: it may simply be funded entirely by purchases.
3. Download size
Sizes in this genre are larger than players expect: the titles in our table sit between 261 MB and 474 MB on the App Store, before the additional content most of them download on first launch. On a metered mobile connection that matters, and both stores can be set to download large apps on Wi-Fi only.
4. Last updated
The update date is the single most useful signal of whether a game is still supported. An actively maintained casual title is usually updated every two to four weeks; the games in our table were all updated within the last month as of 2026-08-13. A puzzle game that has not been touched for a year is likely to have unresolved issues on current phones.
5. Ratings and the number behind them
A rating of 4.5 from two thousand people and a rating of 4.5 from two hundred thousand people are not the same claim. Both stores show the count next to the average, and it is the count that tells you how settled the number is. It is also worth reading the recent one-star reviews rather than the average: in this genre they cluster around specific changes, such as a difficulty adjustment or an event format, which tells you more than the score.
Purchases made in these games are handled by Google or Apple, not by the game developer and not by this site. Refund requests go through the store that took the payment, and Australian consumer law protections apply to those transactions independently of any developer policy.
What the listing will not tell you
- How the difficulty is tuned after level one hundred, which is where most complaints originate.
- Whether an event format is permanent or was running the week the screenshots were taken.
- How much of the content requires a team or club to progress.
Those are the questions the guides on this site try to answer, and they are also the reason we re-check the data in our table rather than publishing it once.
Practical takeaways
- Read the update date before the rating.
- Treat ads and in-app purchases as two separate questions.
- Check the size against your connection and storage.
- Read recent critical reviews, not the average.
Store links go to the official listings. Prices, in-app purchases and availability are shown on the store page and can change at any time.