
Coin Dozer (link) is a free casual iPhone game that recreates the classic coin-pusher games found in supermarkets and arcades everywhere (games where you push coins and tokens so they fall off the edge of a platform and you win prizes). This iPhone version takes away the guilt of wasting your quarters trying to win silly trinkets. The game comes with a surprisingly good physics engine and subtle strategic gameplay that reveals itself over time, rewarding the patient player. Overall, it’s a well-designed game with a few surprises that makes for an excellent free download (we’ve even added it to our 50 Best Free iPhone Games list). I’ve been addicted to it the past two weeks.
Eveyone knows that the coin-drop games you see in supermarkets and arcades are a waste of money. Even though it appears a prize is just a play away, that’s most often not the case. But there’s still something visually hypnotic about all those shiny tokens and prizes teetering on the edge and the rhythmic pulse of the coin pushing machine. Coin Dozer is a good replica of that experience. While the graphics aren’t stunning, the physics for the movement of the coins are realistic—they fall, crash, and land in a manner that is more than I expected from a free game.

Coin Dozer is mostly an achievement game but part survival game as well. The overall objective is to collect all the prizes that occasionally drop into the field of play. But for me, the real fun is the survival part, which is stringing out your coin supply so you can play for as long as possible and win as much stuff as you can in that time period. It’s a type of play that I’ve always appreciated about pinball—how long can you last before spending all your quarters?
You get 40 coins to drop, and can never have more than 40 coins at a time. You earn a coin every 30 seconds. If you quit the game, you earn 5 coins every hour until you have 40 again. You can burn through coins pretty quickly, so there’s a strategic element to pacing your coin usage wisely.
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