Arkade

What it is

Arkade is an arcade in your pocket: a floor of three machines — Ping, Ascent and Ebb — each one a game you can learn in six seconds and spend a long time mastering. A coin buys a play. Every cabinet keeps its own high score table, and the best runs in the world hang on a public top-ten board.

Coins and purchases

The first time you walk in, the house drops eighteen coins in your pocket, and every day you come back it fills the pocket up to twelve — so the first day reads thirty. The daily twelve refill; they don't stack. One coin is one play, and a run lasts as long as you keep it alive.

Two things are for sale, on your card: a roll of twenty coins, and Free Play — sold as Own the Arcade on the App Store — which turns the meter off for good on every machine. To open your card, tap the pocket: the small pill under the machine that shows your coin count. The coins and the two things for sale are at the bottom of the card.

Bought Free Play on another device? On your card, tap Restore Purchases. Apple brings it back to any device signed in with the same Apple account, and Own the Arcade supports Family Sharing. Coins need no restoring: your pocket follows you through iCloud, so a phone and an iPad on the same Apple account share one pocket.

The world board

A top-ten score files under three letters. On your card, under NAME, you can claim a longer name that stands behind your letters on every board. Names are unique — first come, first served — and you can change yours there. If someone knocks you off a board, Arkade can tell you: switch on TOP TEN ALERTS on your card and say yes when iOS asks about notifications.

A new phone, or a reinstall

Your coins, each machine's high score table, your three letters and your longer name are mirrored into your own iCloud. A new phone signed into the same Apple account, or a fresh install, picks up where you left off. A device with no iCloud account keeps its own copy, and nothing else happens.

Playing with a controller

Arkade works with any game controller iOS supports, over Bluetooth or a cable. The instructions on each machine follow whichever you last used, the stick or the glass.

Something wrong?

Write to support@idessa.io. The team at Idessa reads it over lunch. Tell us the machine, what you expected, and what happened instead, and we will get back to you.

Privacy

What the app keeps, what it sends, and how to take it back: the Arkade privacy policy.