Best games to play on a Windows tablet?

[noiseredux]

There's lots of games to be played on those other OS tablets, but I'm always interested in games that work well on a Windows tablet. Point and click adventure stuff is obvious - but what other games seem to work specifically well?

[Cordeos]

Civ 5 and Beyond Earth both have tablet modes, I assume Civ 6 does as well. I have put several controller supported games on my Surface, works really well.

[noiseredux]

good call on the Civ games. I have a couple of them... but have never played them. 

 

And yeah, controller stuff is good. My wife actually got me a new Xbox One S (bluetooth) controller for Christmas that works great. 

 

But for the purposes of this thread, I'm just trying to come up with Windows stuff that works good with just the touch screen. Hearthstone and Duelyst are both constant fixtures of my tablet for instance.

 

I also recently picked up Donsol from Itch.io after seeing it plugged on RPS which seems well suited. It's a digital card game (like standard deck of cards) that is kind of a dungeon crawler thing. It's interesting.

[Cordeos]

There are also games that while they don't directly support touch screen will work well. If you own any turn based games give them a shot, I can't remember which ones, but some video game versions of board games work quite well.

[noiseredux]

Oh oh, yes that reminds me: Talisman is one I've played on tablet and it works great. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

Frozen Synapse? I have no idea, but it seems like it would work well.

[Cordeos]

Xcom might work but my Surface 3 can't run it well enough, if you have a more tricked out one than me it could work

[noiseredux]

my tablet is just a cheapo Acer w/ 2GB RAM so XCOM might be rough. Then again, setting it to lowest settings... maybe there's even a low spec patch? Considering how much I love XCOM, I'm surprised I haven't tried it yet. Although it might be tough to play with tough as left and right click do different things and I'm not sure you can scroll the screen w/o keyboard.

[Paul Smith]

Some time ago I started a thread on NeoGAF rating how various games worked on my Windows tablet:

 

The Great NeoGAF Tablet PC gaming audit: games at your fingertips 

 

The quick summary is that very few games work well with the touch screen. Even point'n'click adventures which you'd expect to work well just don't, because they expect a mouse and a touch screen is not the same as a mouse.

 

Of the games that worked, almost all of them controlled better with a mouse. One surprising frustration was that without a keyboard for you to press ESC, you can't even quit most games.

 

I stopped adding to the thread when I sold my tablet, and I sold my tablet largely because it was useless as a gaming device.

 

Things might have changed since then, and you might find a handful of games that make the effort worthwhile.

[noiseredux]

ah well, your conclusion is a bit disheartening. But that thread looks pretty helpful so I appreciate that. Thanks!

[Jayel]

That neogaf thread touched on it a bit, but I made an altered version of SDL that lets you play dosbox and scummvm games on windows tablets (with scummvm you don't have to use trackpad mode - it has direct cursor mapping support).

 

I made this few years ago though, and it's not the most user-friendliest. I haven't tried the latest dosbox or scummvm, so I don't know where they are at in terms of windows touch interface. If they switched to SDL 2.0, then it's possible that they come with native touch support now.

[noiseredux]

I feel like I do this every six months or so... I start to think that a Windows tablet makes sense in my head as this ultimate portable gaming device. And then I hit a point where I realize that there's so much more stuff made w/ tablets in mind for Android/iOS and I should just stick with portable gaming that way. :\