Grindstone

Grindstone, by Capybara Games, came out on Apple Arcade in 2019 and later reached Switch, Steam, PlayStation and Xbox. Grindstone Mountain is overrun with creeps, and your hero, Jorj, climbs it as a day job: each level is a board of colourful creeps, and you slash through them by drawing a chain of one colour. A long enough chain drops a grindstone, which lets the chain switch to another colour, so the puzzle is in planning a route before the creeps get their turn to strike back.

The campaign runs to more than 600 levels with bosses, hazards, blueprints for new gear, a boss-rush mode and a carnival with a wheel of fortune. Updates have kept adding to it since launch.

The daily side is the Daily Grind. Each daily mode starts every player from the same seed: the same creeps, the same hazards and the same rewards. In the Fortune Grind, how big a chain you hit the wheel with decides what you get. The Cosmic Grind, added in a free update in May 2025, is a series of Ooze-filled levels where you pick gear between stages, and your score counts the levels cleared, the health left and how you slay. Each mode has its own leaderboard for the day. A Quick Grind gives an unranked run with random gear when you want more.

It suits players who like match and chain puzzles with some tactics in them, and who want a short score attack each day on top of a long campaign. It is a paid game on Steam, Switch and consoles, and part of the Apple Arcade subscription on iPhone and iPad.