Game: Yosumin!

Square Enix's Yosumin! began life in 2006 as a Web-based game in Japan that ran in Internet browsers. A year later an enhanced version was released for the Nintendo DS — again, only in Japan. But now this simple but addictive puzzler has finally been published in North America through several casual games portals. There's no real narrative in Yosumin!, just a rapid succession of hundreds of stages—some of which are as short as a few seconds and others of which can stump players for half an hour or more—and a healthy helping of cutesy Japanese design (we're talking bright pink loading screens, kitschy emoticon-style playing pieces, and feverish music that could have been pilfered from a TV game show).