I've just got a brand new Surface Pro, and naturally after setting it up and playing around a bit, I wondered what games would work well with it.

Obviously with the keyboard attached, it can play any game just like a laptop, but there aren't many games that would work purely with touch screen.

I have just tried "king of dragon pass" and it is absolutely perfect for touch. Sitting back on the couch, with tablet in hand, the touch interface works perfectly. Clicking on advisors, moving around the map, changing sliders by dragging my finger.

I wondered if there were any other games (primarily from GOG) you've either tried or suspect would work well with a tablet/touchscreen.

Games which work well with only touch:
- King of Dragon Pass
- Legend of Grimrock (need to enable arrows and tablet mode)
- Heroes of Might and Magic 1-3
- Machinarium
- Torchlight
- Jagged Alliance 2
- Elders scroll: Arena

Games which I've tested and are unplayable with only touch:

- IE games (may work with gemRB, but I'm still figuring it out)
- Spiderweb games

How do you like your Surface Pro? The envy is killing me.

I don't know what GOG games could be good for touch (maybe the Infinity Engine games or Spiderweb games), but I read somewhere that Civ 5 released a patch to enable touch, and it's supposed to run pretty well on the surface.

Maybe FTL? Playing it I thought it would work great with touch, but you use both mouse buttons, plus the middle one to pause the game, so I'm not sure how that part would work there.

What? Middle mouse button pauses! I never knew that.
I'll give it a go, but right mouse clicks are definitely a problem. The Surface Pro is fantastic. Takes a bit of getting used to at first but I like it a lot.

I just thought about the IE games. I'll try geneforge at some point too. Thanks!

Haha Weird I know, but the intention is that you can play the game with nothing but the mouse.

I looked up online and it seems that to right click on the regular desktop you need to touch the screen for two seconds until the regular right click options appear. Maybe that works everywhere, with games too. If it does that would open the door to pretty much every point-and-click adventure game on the catalogue, in which case I would recommend Gemini Rue.

I can see you like gemini Rue from your avatar! I've been meaning to try it for some time now.

The right clicking as you described works on the desktop but it is a little bit difficult to use every time and the 1-2 second delay is a bit of a pain. The slower pace of point and. click adventures might mean it works okay

I tried to play some DosBox games on Android tablet. It's usually not the best experience, since most of them need a keyboard and using vkb there is rather awkward. I'd say if the game wasn't written with touch screen input in mind, you won't get a good result.

Is there an ARM/Linux release of this? I have Nexus 7 where I can run normal Linux (Plasma Active) or Android. But it's an ARM architecture, not x86.

No ARM builds. You can always try running the game under Wine under this 'normal' Linux that you mention. :p

Not going to work. Wine doesn't emulate the CPU, it only provides Windows like environment with shared libraries. But it requires x86. DosBox on the other hand emulates the CPU, that's why you can find DosBox ports on all kind of architectures, including ARM.

sry but no I don't think so. I run Heroes 3 over WINE, but as far as I know WINE can only emulate x86 architecture binaries on a x86 architecture system. But perhaps the way to go could be emulation. :)

Heavy emulation of x86 on ARM sounds like a bad idea. It can work for lighter DosBox games, but full emulation (with Qemu?) would just kill the hardware and won't work fast enough :)

Other than that, I'd like more games to be released for ARM Linux, but even x86 one lags behind in gaming, so ARM has even less :)

For most games this is definitely true but like I Said in op King of dragon pass actually works perfectly even though it wasn't designed for touch.

I will try an IE game, an Adv game and Grimrock now and report my findings

Its not looking good.

Legend of grimrock - only option for moving is WASD, so this game is unplayable on touch

IE games - I tried baldur's gate. The touch interface just doesn't work very accurately with the game at all. Also, I seem unable to pan the camera around, so this is unplayable.

Spiderweb - tried geneforge. So close! and yet so far. The cursor seems to lag behind where you are touching and trying to click on various items works only 1 in 50 times. UNPLAYABLE!

FTL - I can't get it running on my Surface, so I can't test what its like with touch


The good news is that King of Dragon Pass continues to be an absolute pleasure to play with just a touch interface. I highly recommend it!