I missed the first TouchMaster. This is something of a shame because titles like these have nearly every quality I prefer in my portable games: inexpensive, single-cart multiplayer, short games, lots of games and something my kids can play, too. Alladania’s review of the original was pretty glowing; TouchMaster 2 won’t be much different.

TouchMaster 2 (T2) is a collection of 20 games — some familiar, some not so much — that can be played in as little as a few seconds or a few minutes, depending on your skill or available time. The 20 games are divided into five categories: cards, action, strategy, picture games and puzzle. A word of warning: There is no tutorial and only minimal in-game explanation on how to play each game, so you’ll want to read the instruction booklet on this one!

Except for Speed Solitaire, all of the card games were new to me. Speed Solitaire is essentially a series of solvable Solitaire games that you want to clear as quickly as possible. Also included are Combo 11, Carpet, Poker Slide and Triples. Combo 11 is pretty simple — just make pairs equaling 11 out of any two adjacent cards. Assuming you clear the hand (and this is with any game), you get a bonus round or second round. Poker Slide takes a little effort. Using a 5x5 grid and a limited number of card swaps and/or replacements, you must make as many valid poker hands by moving entire columns or rows. Gah.

All of the titles in the action category are akin to arcade games. None are particularly outstanding, but they are fun in multiplayer. Using only the stylus, you have Bowling, Billiards, Catwalk Caper, Beaned! and Speed Demon. Of them all, Beaned! is by far my favorite. Standing at the front of an idyllic street while cardboard cutouts of police, rats, cheerleaders, UFOs and other “stuff” pass by, you have to throw paintballs and try to rack up the best score. Of course, hitting the police or the neighborhood cheerleader isn’t always the wisest course of action ...

I’d played all of the strategy games under another namem, but each was done well here. Super Mahki is a clone of mobile title I owned two phones ago known as Blue Blocks; Prismatix is the all-too-familiar and addicting Hexic; and Dice King is a unique and difficult twist on Yahtzee (imagine if Yahtzee and Bejeweled were to mate). Dice King presents you with 70 dice on a match-3 board. Each gives you the number you created the match-3 from in one of seven slots; you need to get triples on 1–6s, a full house, quads, quints and two pair. But, there’s a limited number of dice. And, if you don’t get your three of a kind within those seven slots, the seventh slot disappears. I think I’ve explained that. It is, by far, my favorite game of T2 and the one that has given me the most trouble.

The Picture Game category was disappointing. Either the games were too easy or they gave me hints too soon. Included are View Finder, Scavenger, What Is it? and Picture Slide. View Finder was the one I enjoyed most. I simply had to find the difference between two very subtly Photoshopped images. Scavenger is a hidden-object game that changes the color of the hidden objects — making them no longer hidden — before I had the chance to look for them. What Is It? slowly brings in the image of something while giving you the number of letters in the image, but none were particularly difficult. And Picture Slide is a slide puzzle; these are great until you learn the pattern to move the pieces; then they all become simple.

Puzzle is rather a hodgepodge category. At first I thought it was going to be word games as the first two games — Rampage Empire and Spellwinder — were just that, word games. Spellwinder is basically Boggle, but Rampage Empire is something really fun. Take the ape from Rampage: Total Annihilation and put him on a building to destroy. But, he can only take down a floor once you’ve unscrambled the word on that floor ... or bus ... or plane ... It’s really fun! The final game, Catacombs, is a simple dungeon crawler, akin to Gauntlet but with far fewer enemies.

Touchmaster 2 is a great collection of games to carry in your back pocket when you don’t know how long you’ll be standing in line or waiting at the doctor’s office. It also does a fantastic job of keeping an anxious 9-year-old busy while waiting for food at the local restaurant. I never needed to hand him the game; we played in versus mode — a good-natured versus mode at that. Needing only one cart for two people at a price of $29.99 puts this in my category of both must-haves and going to keep for a long time.