5 Card Touch from Griffin Technology is a very simple game for iPhone and iPod touch that emulates the most basic poker slot machine game -- 5 card draw.

Here's how it works. You start with $1,000 in virtual funds and place your bet of between $1 and $5. You are dealt five cards, face up. In the figure below I bet the maximum ($5) and received a pair of nines, a pair of fours, and a three. After you receive five cards you have the option of discarding up to five cards and drawing new cards to replace them. Since the three was no help to my hand, I tapped it to indicate that I wanted to discard it and draw a new card to replace it. At this point, things looked like this:

I then tapped the draw button to receive a card to replace the three I discarded. The replacement card was a five, which didn't improve my hand.

So my hand was two pair, nines and fours, which is a winning hand and paid $10 as you see above.

At the end of each hand you place your bet for the next hand, receive five new cards, and the cycle starts again.

It takes a pair of Jacks or any higher hand to win. If your hand is lower than a pair of Jacks (i.e. a pair of tens, any pair lower than that, or no pair at all), you lose your bet.

Tap the arrow on the right side of the screens above to see the How to Play screen, which includes a table of payouts and statistics on your play to date.

That's all there is to it. You place your bet, choose which cards to discard, draw new cards to replace them, then either lose your bet or win between $1 and $4,000. Then place your bet for the next hand and do it again.

The only option available is resetting your stats and starting over. The only other feature worth mentioning is that the currency you use is location-based. Since I'm in the USA, it's dollars for me. But if I were in France it would be in Euros. Or Yen if I were in Japan. And so on.

The Bottom Line

It's very simple but if you like five card draw poker or poker slot machines, it's surprisingly addicting and worth every penny of its $1.99 price tag. The graphics and animations are nicely done and each hand takes but a few seconds to play, making it perfect when you only have a few minutes to kill.