Amazon’s just announced a special deal. “For a limited time, customers’ favorite Kindle games — including Scrabble, Mahjong Solitaire and NY Times Crosswords — are on sale for just $0.99 each.”

Here’s a complete list of the games available at the special 99-cent price.





View the web page at tinyurl.com/KindleGameSale

The offer ends March 27 — a week from Sunday. The sale is apparently designed to encourage Kindle owners to buy these games over the next 10 days, so the games will start appearing on Amazon’s best-seller lists. And it’s working. Instantly Scrabble shot into the #1 spot on the Kindle best-sellers list, and Solitaire became the #2 best-selling item in the Kindle store.

In fact, six of the 10 best-selling items in the Kindle store are now games. (Mahjong Solitaire is currently #4, Sudoku Unbound is #5, and a New York Times Crosswords collection is #10.) Interestingly, even the new Word Search game (released February 3) is now #8 — though it’s not even one of the games that’s being touted in Amazon’s special promotion. It’s been in the top 100 since the day it was released, and for some reason, it’s also listed on Amazon’s Nonfiction best-sellers list, where it’s #2 — behind Sudoku Unbound.

Every game in this special promotion is now among the top 100 best-sellers — and there’s at least three more 99-cent games that have also crashed into the top 100. (There’s Slingo — which used to retail for $3.99 — as well as Flip It and Maze A Thon!) That means 13 of the top 100 best-sellers in the Kindle store are all games. Besides the six

top-10 titles listed above, here’s a list of the remaining seven.



Slingo (#16)

Hangman for Kids (#19)

Chess (#22)

Triple Town (#44)

Texas Hold ‘Em (#45)

FlipIt (#60)

Maze A Thon (#65)





Amazon sent out an e-mail Tuesday touting these games to Kindle owners who’d requested special promotional announcements. (“Check out these bestsellers that customers describe as fun, addictive, and a great way to take a break from reading.”) And I was surprised to see that there’s still more new games in the Kindle store — or at least, some games that I hadn’t seen before.

For example, there’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain — a sort of one-player Dungeons and Dragon’s game based on the “Fighting Fantasy” series of game books. It’s a text adventure with some nice black-and-white illustrations, and even the rolling dice get adorned with some very fancy graphics.

And I have to admit that I’m intrigued by a new word game called “Word Soup.” There’s over 125 different letters displayed on a grid, and the object is to build words out of the adjacent letter blocks. But when you create a word, all its letters disappear from the grid, while the remaining letters drop down a row. There’s at least 13 different rows, so it gets pretty complicated — but it looks like a lot of fun. Even at $2.99, it’s already one of the top 200 best-selling items in Amazon’s Kindle store.

But for the next 10 days, it’s going to have a lot of competition from all the 99-cent games!