Zen Koi

[chomiji]

I got myself hooked on a mobile/phone game, Zen Koi. It's very pretty and relaxing.

You are a koi baby and you swim around, eating various types of pond life and gaining levels and achievements:

My current koi, Akaneko, with "good" (green) pond plants, uninflated puffer fish (there's a second one inside the plants), a water boatman bug, and (almost offscreen) a green algae blob. Akaneko is 9th level and has been full grown for a while now.

Mainly, you craft gems by eating n number of particular little critters, and when you have enough gems, you can use them to magically expand the size of your pond.

When you get to a certain level, other koi will swim by, and you can choose to mate with them. The two of you will then have an egg, which you can either save and eventually hatch, or release into the wild. One of the goals of the game is to collect various color combinations and patterns of koi, so you might not want to keep an egg that is likely to hatch into a type of koi you've already had.

And when you get high enough level and have grown the pond as large as you can, you evolve into this:

My third Ascended koi, now a dragon. He looked like Akaneko but with black instead of red.

It's a free game for iPhone and Android. Of course, it does try to get you to buy stuff, mainly the pink pearls, which you can use to buy koi slots and things. You start out with four koi slots. I have earned enough pearls through game play to buy a fifth slot.

ETA: HT to umadoshi, who recently had a link to an article about calming mobile games.