Family Games Fun for iPad and iPhone is a collection of traditional head-to-head and single-player family favorites, such as Battleship, Hangman, Dots, Tic-Tac-Toe and more.

Family Games features a unique hand-drawn art style that tries to simulate pen or pencil on notebook paper.  It’s a nice common thread, but there are times when the presentation is a bit confusing, like on the menu screen, where the “Options” drawing and the “Tournament” mode look very similar to another game.

In fact, it took us a while to realize exactly how to get the ability to play some of these great games with multiple players, since they lent themselves perfectly to pass and play fun.  What you need to do is select the bottom right icon and “Add Players” to your profile in order to play multiplayer.  This was a bit confusing, we think.

Before each game, there’s a Rock Scissors Paper choice to see who goes first.  After that, it’s into the action.  With the exception of Tic-Tac-Toe, most modes offer a very deep level of replayable enjoyment.

In all, there are 8 games in Family Games Fun:

Battle Fleet – Like Battleship, you hide your ships on a grid, and take turns trying to find where your opponent’s are hidden before they find yours.

Noughts & Crosses (Tic-Tac-Toe) – While normally not a challenge, the ability to play in a 4x4 or 5x5 grid adds new complexity, but you’ll likely end up in a cats game still.

Matchsticks – Cool puzzle game presents you with an array of matchsticks and asks you to transform the shape with only a limited number of moves.

Squares (Dots) – One of our favorite time-wasters growing up, you connect dots in a grid one line a time, trying to seal off more boxes than your opponent.

4 In-A-Row – Like Connect Four, this classic puzzle game never gets old for us.

Nine Men’s Morris (Mill) – Probably the most obscure game here, this one takes some time to get used to if you’ve never played before.

Hangman – Classic guess-a-letter game, with a number of different categories like Words, Celebrities, Music and Games.

Safe Cracker – A guess the sequence game in which players must select numbers, and receive clues about how many are correct and in the right place. 

Overall, we recommend Family Games Fun as a great for families, especially those with iPads.  Once you figure out how to enable multiplayer mode (select the lower right option on the game selection screen), there’s plenty of “pass and play” and single player puzzle action that make this App a great choice for families who want to play together.