If there ever was a movie titled something along the lines of “The Geek-Empire Strikes Back”, the opening scene would be something like the following: a game contest in a huge hall. Napoleon Dynamite playing with Bill McKay (Galifianakis in the Candidate); the Superbad dudes going crazy over the board game, Tina Fey struggling to be the top player and lastly, Ron Burgundy hosting the evening. In this make-believe universe, the game they would be playing would be Yushino, a fun crossword game but with numbers!

Yushino is a lot more fun than just a game with numbers — you’ve got to create the right sequences play strategically. Quick overview of some of the features in a recent update:

• Free tokens for tweeting or posting at the end of each game!
• Finally, a celebration for your Yushinos!
• Better instructions for the newbies!
• Better search for new players… better games… more new friends!
• Better notifications.

The game is fairly simple simple: you just add to the right and you create words with numbers all by adding the two last numbers!

So this is what the cryptograph, Yiannis Tsiounis (the developer of Yushino), thought and he came up with the idea of a simple numbers game, based on the Caesar cipher or else, the cryptographic algorithm Julius Caesar used in order to protect his confidential mail.

I’ve spent a few hours playing Yushino and it can be fun, challenging, and quite addictive. Having an iPad, I was hoping that there would be native iPad support with an Universal application or a separate app just for the iPad, however, there is no such option (yet). Hopefully soon though, the developers will bring native iPad support and graphics to Yushino making it available to more people.

Overall, the gameplay is smooth and the game itself is pretty polished. The developers are keeping the game bug free as best as they can plus they have added new content updates here and there (currently Yushino is at version 1.2). Hands down, the best thing about the game is it is completely free to play with no ads — there are optional in-app purchases to buy tokens, though. You can download Yushino from the App Store by clicking here.

Rating 4/5 Stars