Skiller offers mobile skill games for free

We like mysterious mobile gaming start-ups, so when we got an email from a company called Skiller inviting us to download its Alpha client, we leapt at the chance.

The Skiller app comes with the tagline "The world's playground", and according to the firm's website is "an innovative playground of skill games for adults and teens which is accessible from web and mobile."

Skiller reckons it'll blend multiplayer casual games with social networking elements like profiles, friends, chat and tournaments.

You can sign up for the Alpha client here, which sends an SMS link to your phone that in turn takes you to a WAP site to download the Skiller application. Our N81 8GB wasn't supported, but we took a chance on the N76 version, and it seems to be working.

You sign in by choosing a username and password, and are then presented with a list of available games, including 4 in a Row, Reversi, Checkers, Sketris and Popcorn (the latter two are versions of Tetris and Breakout, respectively).

Some of the games, like Reversi and Checkers, appear to be multiplayer, so you can set up a game and wait for someone to join, or go to the Skiller lobby to see who's already waiting.

Meanwhile, there are tournaments for the single-player games, which cost you points to enter, and offer prizes of points. And it seems that points may equal real money or prizes when the application launches for real, judging by the Help section on the website.

For now, you get 1,000 points just for registering, allowing you to explore the app and its various games.

The community aspects seem interesting, as you can sign up friends as your buddies and then message them from within the application to play a multiplayer game.

It all looks very slick, with a nice menu carousel running along the bottom of the screen. The games are basic, to say the least, but are colourful and fun for a quick bash – with the competitive aspects being presumably what'll keep you playing.

It's clearly early days, but after playing with the Alpha app, we're definitely going to keep tabs on Skiller to see how it develops – particularly the web elements (we wonder if it could be a Facebook application, for example).

Have a look, and see what you think. Currently, the Alpha works on these handsets:

Sony Ericsson: W910, W850i, W660i, T650i, K880i, K850i, K810i, K800i, K610i, K530i

Motorola: K3, V3, V3x, V3xx, V6, Z3