You’ve almost certainly heard of Minecraft. Aside from being the best-selling video game of all time, it’s proving remarkably durable, still claiming some 140 million active users more than a decade after its launch. Not only that, the Mozillion Mobile Gaming report found it’s still the most searched for mobile game in the world.

Minecraft is based on the straightforward idea of players exploring and changing block-like worlds, using the resources available to craft items, build shelter and even create simple machines. Although the graphics are far from the peak of the latest games running on modern devices, that’s kind of missing the point. Minecraft succeeds partly because of its blocky appeal, and endures because despite its simple mechanics, almost anything is possible.

Another reason for Minecraft’s success is the wide variety of rules with which players can interact with the world. Creative mode lets you go nuts for building and crafting, safe from the various monsters roaming about. Survival pits you against the world – you need to find and make food, shelter and weapons to survive. Perhaps most importantly, multiplayer lets you play cooperatively with friends, or compete with them to create the best buildings or other items.

It’s important to know that Minecraft can be unsuitable for children. In certain modes, features like lava or monsters can kill the player or their pets – wild animals they may have tamed and grown attached to. For younger children, it may be wise to stick to creative mode and simply allow them to build and craft. Multiplayer and chat features allow children to interact with other players, with the inevitable safeguarding risks – you can disable both through the parental control settings.

With the appropriate safeguards in place, Minecraft remains a brilliantly creative environment for children to play in. Younger children will enjoy shaping the landscape, and creating basic buildings. Older ones will benefit from the game’s depth, as they work out how to become master crafters, turning the environment to their advantage.

CBeebies Playtime Island is less a game, and more a collection of mini games themed on CBeebies shows. As such, the exact content varies a little depending on what’s currently being shown, but you can rely on appearances from favourites such as Duggee, Swashbuckle, and the omnipresent Mr Tumble. At any time, expect about 13 or 15 shows, each with at least a couple of stories or games available.

This app’s games vary from fun action like Hey Duggee’s Paddling Badge, through interactive adventures like Love Monster’s Challenge Yourself Day, to bedtime with Moon & Me. Games are usually simple without much in-depth content, exactly as you’d expect for the target age group of around 2-5 – you can safely ignore the App Store’s baffling 4+ age rating.

Without doubt, the best thing about Playtime Island is that you know it’s entirely safe for toddlers. There are no adverts or upgrades, either, as it’s entirely free. This makes it a comparatively stress-free way to earn a bit of peace and quiet when looking after young children.

Bridge Constructor Portal is an entertaining game for grownups, but it’s also suitable for older children looking for something a bit more challenging. A mashup between the hugely successful Bridge Constructor and Portal series, BCP has you building hilariously shonky bridges for the Bendies of the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre. Get it wrong and they’re variously dissolved, vapourised or simply stuck. Get it right and you’ll be rewarded with more responsibility – and stress.

This game combines the physics-based challenge of actually building a bridge, with the additional complexity of portals that may or may not lead where you want them to. The basics are easy for children to grasp, but the complexity of building and rebuilding to solve some levels means it’s probably most suited to kids aged about eight or older.

Although you can progress to the next level once a single Bendy makes it across,BCP’s real challenge lies in safely getting a convoy to the goal. Multiple vehicles, setting up nail-biting oscillations, tend to cause all kinds of chaos, and no small amount of laughs. There’s a surprising amount of depth and variation in this game’s 60 levels, but their difficulty curve could do with smoothing out a bit – some levels stand out as being especially tricky – you may find yourself helping out more than once.

Bloons TD is a hugely successful series of tower defence games, available on both Android and iOS. Most of them work on a freemium model, where the apps are free and ad-supported, but you can stop the ads by buying upgrade packages within the game. All the Bloons TD games are entertaining, and simple enough that children from about four or five can find them really entertaining.

That said, Bloons Monkey City is our favourite. Monkey City manages to combine the familiar Bloons TD game with a slightly more strategic, city-building model. It’s not overly complicated or challenging, but it adds a little depth and long-term planning to the game play, making it suitable for older children who are looking for something a little more challenging and rewarding.

Even so, it’s not especially complex or challenging. There’s no reason why younger children from around six might not enjoy it, despite the 9+ App Store rating.

Monkey City’s ads and nags can be a little annoying, with the occasional video ad disrupting play for 30 seconds or so. That said, at the time we tested the Android version there was a Starter Pack upgrade which would remove all forced ads, priced at just £2. Given the addictive gameplay, cute graphics and unusually good music tend to win kids over, that seems more than reasonable.

It’s late 2009 and the world is about to go completely nuts for a game involving birds, pigs, and a whole load of breakable, finely balanced scenery. Yes, it’s Angry Birds, the huge game franchise still going strong today.

This re-release is faithful to the original release, where a bunch of pigs have, for purely culinary reasons, stolen the titular birds’ eggs – and boy are they displeased. You must target various classes of birds at the pigs’ defences, breaking them down with each avian’s special abilities to defeat the pigs and win back your eggs.

This app offers a huge amount of absorbing gameplay considering its token cost, combining eight episodes of the franchise to deliver almost 400 levels. It may be old, but it’s still entertaining, and almost guaranteed to occupy kids for hours at a time. It’s perhaps a bit samey for grownups, and – whisper it – just a little irritating, but young children will love it, and older ones will enjoy trying to get three stars on every level.