Having received a jury summons, and with my mental health being how it is, I recently took a bus to the nearby used bookstore. The rule of buying secondhand books is this: You must pretend, while in the store, that your phone doesn’t exist; you must not come in looking for anything in particular; you must let yourself be guided by the titles and covers and the blurbs alone. So I followed my nose over to the “poetry and art criticism” shelf of the store (which, I am convinced, is to blame for my poor performance at parties) and started browsing.

There I found Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games and immediately developed a crush. Maybe it was the title, which seemed carefully engineered not to appeal to the general public. Or maybe it was the editor, Carmen Maria Machado, whose short story collection Her Body and Other Parties is a personal favourite. Either way, the anthology of nineteen pieces from nineteen authors about approximately nineteen games was in excellent condition, and had been marked down to eight dollars, so I added it to my little stack of purchases and wandered over to the checkout.

Like all anthologies, Critical Hits varies widely in quality across its component essays (and one comic). It starts strong: its introduction is a delight, with some of the best footnotes I’ve ever enjoyed. Likewise its first essay, Elissa Washuta’s “I Struggled a Long Time with Surviving,” an exploration of her experience with The Last of Us, pandemic, and intractable illness was deeply impactful and genuinely changed how I looked at the game. But this is par for the course with anthologies (at least, well-compiled ones) which know to dazzle you off the bat with their best material, so that you’re willing to endure their worst. Here, in my estimation, the worst is Anders Morson’s “The Cocoon,” which cites Brian Tomasik (one of those insufferable San Fransisco Rationalists) to argue that, in aggregate, it’s unethical to kill video game NPCs. Morson then goes on to list every Aliens game ever released, for six pages, with dazzling insights like “Aliens: Colonial Marines for PS3 Xbox (2013) is definitely an Aliens-y FPS.”

In aggregate, though, the anthology is more good than bad. Apart from “The Cocoon,” the worst essays here are mostly just mediocre, or meandering. And there are some true standouts here: Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Cathartic Warfare,” nat steele’s “I Was a Teenage Transgender Supersoldier.” And the reason I’m here, writing this essay of my own: Larissa Pham’s “Status Effect,” an exploration of depression, damage-over-time, and Genshin Impact.

Released globally in 2020 for PC and mobile devices, Genshin Impact is an action-adventure game which sees players assemble a four-person team from its extensive cast of characters and then wander out into its expansive open world to complete monsters, open quests, and kill chests (something like that, anyway). A live-service game, Genshin has seen regular map expansions and a remarkably stable playerbase for the last five years, and, like WoW before it, has spawned a wave of copycats hoping to take a bite out of the aging titan’s colossal corpus. Larissa Pham and I would have started playing Genshin at around the same time – she describes becoming obsessed with the game in the winter of 2020-2021; I first launched the game in February of 2021, in the icy depths of the pandemic, shortly after failing to kill myself, as something to do while waiting for the hospital bills to pour in.

In Status Effect, Pham recounts a minor controversy from the fall of 2021. Genshin’s meta had stagnated: a year into its lifespan, no one wanted to include healers on their team, when shielders were proactive and dodging was free. So the developers implemented a damage-over-time status effect called corrosion, inflicted by certain enemies and in certain phases of endgame content, which ignored shields and would wipe the whole team if not healed through. Genshin’s community was and is large enough that any kind of meta shift (however necessary) will spark outcry, controversy, and apocalypse prophets heralding doom (I was one of them: “What, am I just not supposed to use my Zhongli? No one’s gonna pull for fucking Kokomi”), but for Pham, that debuff gave her the language to think and speak about her depression more concretely.

Genshin has never given me the language I needed to think or speak about anything. Frankly, I don’t think the game’s story, which is consistently a mediocre slog (with a few bright spots) is capable at this point of doing anything interesting or novel. Even in Pham’s case, Genshin’s “corrosion” debuff might have been fungible with any damage-over-time debuff in any game – Pham just happened to be playing Genshin at the time when she needed it. But even saying this, even speaking as someone who cares about a game’s story more than any other element, I think Genshin is a fantastic game, in at least one major aspect: its exploration and world design.

Upon its announcement, Genshin was panned as “anime Breath of the Wild” a comparison enabled by its gliding and climbing and stamina meter and early-game monster designs and the shade of its grass. But cosmetic similarities aside, Genshin is actually doing something very different – very unique, I think. Genshin presents the player with an extremely large, colorful, and ever-expanding world, peppered with a truly mind-boggling amount of chests, environmental puzzles, and enemy camps. From any given point in the world, you can probably see several little leads to follow: a locked chest in a monster den; a blue faerie waiting to lead you to its court; a movement time trial; a floating elemental oculus. And once you pick one of those, and figure it out, you’ll once again be able to look around and see more chests to open, more stuff to collect, more things to do. So the world is incredibly dense with collectibles, but traversing it is surprisingly weighty. Climbing, gliding, running; all of these are either slow, or stamina-intensive, so you’ll move through the world at a light jog much of the time. This means that you can often see and plan a route to many different puzzle or collectibles before getting to them; it means that, instead of a constant stream of opening chests, each little dopamine hit is separated by a long breath, where you can appreciate the absolutely gorgeous world, and its stirring, melancholy music. And often, quests and puzzles and chests and collectibles will be laid out in a remarkably subtle web, designed to tug the player off the beaten path, towards some of the game’s most gorgeous sights, its most scenic vistas (of which there are plenty).

So maybe in terms of its exploration philosophy Genshin is an open-world collect-a-thon, more similar to a Super Mario Odyssey than a Breath of the Wild. But really, it’s nothing like either game, or anything else I’ve played; so much could be said about the game’s combat, its world quests, its approach to rewards, the way the game’s levelling systems encourage diverse engagement with the open world. I’ll instead conclude with this: Genshin Impact has my favourite exploration experience of any game I’ve ever played, and nothing else really even comes close.

Early in the game’s lifespan (December 2020), the developers added the new Dragonspine region: a frozen mountain, home to the bones of dragons and the ruins of an ancient civilization, introducing lethal new mechanics as a way to shake up exploration. Arguably a precursor to corrosion, while in Dragonspine, a status effect called “sheer cold” would accumulate and, once maxed, drain your health at such a high rate that no shielding or healing could keep up. Getting wet would accelerate cold accumulation; eating hot foods, lighting fires, or standing near heat sources would slow or reverse it. It encouraged a different playstyle; beyond keeping a fire character on your team, sheer cold also encouraged players to explore more deliberately; to stay close to heat sources and not stray too far from the path.

In Dragonspine, the main plot involves restoring an ancient relic called the Skyfrost Nail – an enormous pillar, shattered. Beginning at a base camp at Dragonspine’s foot, you slowly ascend the mountain, fighting monsters, exploring ancient, sealed laboratories, and maybe getting distracted to grab a chest here or a crimson agate there. On the way up, you learn fragments of the story of the ancient civilization that dwelt on Dragonspine, before it froze over; you hear of their research in alchemy, and the celestial nail that was flung down by the gods – to stop their research, before they climbed too high? It was this nail that froze Dragonspine, and somehow corrupted it; it is this nail that you find in broken fragments at Dragonspine’s peak. Beset by truly diabolical monster encounters designed to freeze you fast and absolutely ruin your afternoon, you thaw these fragments and watch as they ascend, reforming the nail, the enormous pillar hanging high above Dragonspine, ready to fall once more. You can, at last, ride the wind currents all the way up to stand on the head of the nail, at what was at the time the highest point in all of Tevyat, to gaze at the world around. All the lands accessible: Liyue and its harbor; Mondstadt and its cathedral, and beyond them, those inaccessible, not yet implemented into the game, represent as abstract hills, mountain, and sea, rolling endlessly into the distant grey fog.

It was February of 2021, and I had failed to die. Had been released from the hospital into the slushy, wet aftermath of a winter storm, with enough medication to last two more weeks and (though I didn’t know it at the time) enough debt to last through to this very day – if only because I stubbornly refuse to pay it. I returned to my on-campus apartment to discover that I had no heating, no power. Hot water, at least, for tea and baths and thin, meatless soups. According to the thermostat, my poorly-insulated home was hovering around 51°F, so I dragged my mattress off the bedframe, into the corner where it was warmer, sealed myself under a mountain of blankets, and opened my laptop.

I had meant to start drafting emails to professors, to explain my weeks-long absence and ask for extensions, grace, and leniency (all would eventually give it, and I didn’t even have to use the s-word, or show the doctors’ notes I had so dutifully accumulated). But in that moment, my hands were shaking from the cold and the anxiety: the knowledge that my life could be ruined, my academic scholarship lost, if any of them declined. So instead, I opened the app store, downloaded Genshin Impact, and, after a couple days of sleepless, bloodshot gaming sessions, climbed the Skyfrost Nail in Dragonspine.

Genshin might not have been capable of giving me the language to understand my experience with depression, dysphoria, and suicide, but it was certainly there when I needed it – the unique, frictional experience it provided offering a strange resonance with my own. And I kept playing it for a long time, perpetually enchanted by its world, its music, the waves of nostalgia and grief that would wash over me at the strangest times.

In the summer of 2021, I wrote a poem, for a poetry class, which began with the lines, “The economy being how it is / Instead of finishing school / I took a job this autumn at the Indiana Dunes.” It was a narrative poem, the only type of poem I’ve ever been able to write. In it, the speaker wanders around on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan in the aftermath of a heavy storm, picking their way around shredded volleyball nets and desolate lounge chairs, all half-buried under wet, sandy drifts. They’re looking for their phone, probably hopelessly lost amidst the dunes, but in the end, climbing Mt. Baldy (a very tall dune; not actually a mountain), they find that what they were searching for was not actually their phone – was, instead, perspective. A broader view of the world’s beauty. “On a clear day, from there, you can see all the way to Chicago,” they think, before beginning the climb. But in the end, reaching the top, the day is not clear, so they are left to “feast [their] eyes on the endless expanse of grey water.”

I must apologize for exposing you to my immature poetry, but the fact that I remember so many lines from that tiny, throwaway piece, from one of my least notable college classes, has always been suspicious to me. I suspect that it contains some sort of heartbreaking insight into my mindset at the time – a tragic longing for the picturesque (to quote a book I haven’t read). I played games where you climbed a mountain, wrote poems where the speaker climbed a dune; some nights, I walked a quarter mile to the parking garage near my apartment and climbed to the top level and leaned on the concrete railing and stared out through life-affirming chicken wire. I wanted to see in color, I suppose; to recapture the vividity of a world that I found increasingly exhausting, but mostly saw only greys: grey distance fog, grey water, and the grey existence of a college-town suburb, shining dully under the light-polluted grey sky.

In November of 2022, Genshin Impact released its 3.2 update “Akasha Pulses, the Kalpa Flame Rises,” which didn’t add any new regions to the map. Instead, it contained the concluding act of the Sumeru region’s main story quest, where the player teams up with a god, a couple academics, a dancer and a cop to fight the evils of the censored internet. For Genshin, this quest (and its preceding acts) were well above par, featuring (among other strengths) actual themes, and a plot that went beyond its gnostic inspirations. So, sure, 3.2 was a timely, relatively compelling update. It was also the update where I quit playing Genshin Impact – for good, I thought. There is simply only so much exploration, questing and combat that can be done in the same world, structure and systems before a work of art overstays its welcome. It wasn’t with any malice that I quit Genshin – I had simply had enough, and that was that.

My life had changed a great deal in the intervening period. I had finished college, moved cities, learned to cook, become a woman. Gotten a second dose of the COVID vaccine, the day before the move, and spent the entire ride to my new home feeling miserably ill because of it.

Around the same time, Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon, compilers for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games would have been working on their collection. It’s a collection that lives in the shadow of COVID-19 – almost every piece here, you can detect the pandemic’s penumbra (if it isn’t explicitly mentioned). For a lot of people, the pandemic was isolating, lonely, cold. For writers, it might have been that too, but we are solitary creatures, and the thing it gave us was, most of all, time: to play games, to write or fail to write, to think, to spiral.

Perhaps to counteract this spiral, Graywolf Press, a Minnesota-based not-for-profit publishing house, spent the pandemic hosting “cute mental health cocktail hours.” Lennon was there, Machado was there (my beloved Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf) and it was there that Critical Hits was conceptualized.

“What we wanted to do was have a really diverse group of writers to provide a very diverse perspective of gaming, by writing about games however they want. We sort of gave them free rein,” Machado says, in an interview she and Lennon gave to Dazed Digital. “It was wild how people were like, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ Everything that came in was so good and so interesting and so different. It was a really extraordinary group of artists who had so many things to say.”

I don’t know how Larissa Pham, who wrote my favourite essay in the collection, first became attached to it. Shockingly, there aren’t that many interviews or monographs out there describing the creation process for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, a book with fewer than 500 ratings on Goodreads. Pham has written a smattering of fiction, nonfiction and creative nonfiction; essays, short stories, criticism. Avant-garde poetry, presented on an interactive github website. Kinky lesbian erotica. A cultural commentary about tradwives and baking. She also, at least for a while, played Genshin Impact, at the same time I and everyone else did. I am struck by the strange syzygy of our experiences. Pham graduated Yale; I went to a state school. She gets published; I post to Tildes. She teaches classes; I am constantly struck by how much I have to learn. But in the winter of 2020-2021, both of us, grappling with our respective illnesses, crossed paths with this game, and it was there for us when we needed it.

In January of 2025, I bought and read Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games. In early February, instilled with a sense of nostalgia for a game I hadn’t touched in years, and tired of playing Shadow of the Erdtree (another game with excellent exploration of a very different kind) I downloaded the HoyoPlay launcher and, with it, Genshin Impact.

Logging in, I was greeted with an embarrassment of little red exclamation marks, attached to almost every UI element, there to helpfully explain what I had missed, what was new, and all the crazy exciting retention-driving bonuses the game would give me to help me catch up. According to the huge new blank spaces on the map, I had many more regions to explore; according to the quest log, many more mediocre stories to sit through. According to my backpack, enough saved-up resources from before I had quit to immediately acquire and build the 5-star character Arlecchino, the only female character in the game – out of some sixty, now – who could plausibly be described as handsome (her vest buttons on the left). Perhaps I should have been overwhelmed. But sinking back into Genshin’s loop felt like coming home. Swimming through the new undersea regions, Fontaine and the Sea of Bygone Eras, offered a welcome twist to what was still a fundamentally fantastic exploration loop. Quests like “The Dirge of Bilquis” and “Masquerade of the Guilty” might not have been brilliant, but featured gorgeous locations, entertaining set pieces, and even an excellent VA performance or two.

Apparently, I was coming back at a bad time. Shortly before I collected my Arlecchino, a new character had been released: Mavuika. I never got around to playing the quests where she was featured, but apparently she was poorly written and presented a real problem for Genshin’s balance. Mavuika, you see, has a magical motorbike that a). Doesn’t really fit with Genshin’s usual magitech aesthetics and b). Removes all discernible friction from exploration, with its ability to drive super fast, climb walls, ride on water, and even, for a short time, fly. I was slightly scandalized when I heard about her, frankly.

“Sure,” I thought, “This doesn’t affect me, I’m never going to use her. But if a new player spends their limited resources to get Mavuika (a smart decision; she is, in addition to everything else, a very strong DPS, powercreeping Arlecchino) won’t that ruin the game for them? Won’t her ability to bypass all the exploration challenges in the game take away the one thing that makes it so special?” It felt like the game jumping the shark, releasing a broken character to make a quick buck at the expense of its long-term health. But truthfully, I was a tourist in Genshin this time, coming back to gawk at how it had changed after years of absence. I have no real stake in its balance. I don’t really recommend anyone play it. What happens to the meta and monetization of this game I once loved terribly is now water off a dyke’s back.

Things that I used to get very up-in-arms about no longer really bother me. I’m sometimes unsure whether that’s a result of healing or hypernormalisation.

I had jury duty at the Seattle Municipal Court that month, a boxy building downtown. Had to report in at nine in the morning, riding the bus, shaking slightly from the cold and the anxiety. Of course, it’s not yet illegal to be a transsexual in one of the most wonderfully LGBT-indifferent cities on the planet, but the current political climate lends itself to overthinking.

Potential jurors are to report to the eleventh floor, to an airy, high-ceilinged, window-walled space crammed with chairs and tables and an attached kitchenette – the vending machines offering instruction on how to contact the county for reimbursement. We were to be paid twenty-five dollars per day (plus transit and food costs, if applicable). We were to watch informational videos, fill out cursory forms, and read quietly until called. It was all terribly adolescent, terribly bland. I found myself ruminating on the abstract sculpture pieces hanging from the ceiling, wondering whether their creators had intended them for this space, or whether they had been sentenced to hang here – as a punishment for reckless driving, maybe? What kind of cases even get tried in municipal court? Eventually, I went out onto the rooftop terrace, with only my coffee to protect me from the chilly, cloudy February weather.

To the west, I could see out the Port of Seattle, its great cranes priestly in their red and white liveries, their still solemnity. A container ship lay still in the bay, making no progress to its destination. And nearer: a sliver of downtown. An empty pit, filled with the refuse of aborted construction, bags of trash, tiny blue dumpsters. Graffiti, content indiscernible. Brown brick buildings; a yellow taxi (!) threading between them. A whole city, half asleep, stirring amid the late morning fog. It started to rain, a miserable spitting drizzle, and I scurried inside to protect my book and my temperamental hair.

This February, on my last day playing Genshin Impact, I received a DM from a random, low-level stranger named Quentin. “HELP!!” it said. I joined his world in co-op mode.

Quentin was exploring Dragonspine. When I arrived, his shiny new (low-level) Mavuika was frozen solid by an ice mage, a couple steps away from drowning in a nearby pool, like my own characters had been four years ago. There are some challenges, it seems, that even the most broken character cannot bypass.

Quentin and I summited Dragonspine together. I was shocked to discover that, even after four years, I still remembered the climb almost perfectly. Still remembered the jagged ruins; the wind currents; the terrifying monsters that had killed me over and over again. I hadn’t resorted to messaging strangers to defeat them, but it’s pretty common to do so – new players almost always struggle with Dragonspine. And so there I was, the helpful stranger this time, jogging forward, activating waypoints, lighting fires, killing chunky minibosses with a single unbuffed normal attack while Quentin stood behind me and put motivational stickers in the chat (stickers are the de facto mode of communication in Genshin co-op, as it’s never a surety that any two players will share a language). Quentin was there – why else? – to repair the skyfrost nail. Sure, his Mavuika could motorbike faster than my characters could climb, but still he slowed down so that we could make the ascent side-by-side. And when he seemed to struggle with the light puzzling involved in thawing the nail fragments, I sat my Arlecchino down next to important clues that he was missing and posted slightly stern stickers until he noticed.

At the end of the cutscene where the pillar at last rises into the sky, Quentin and I climbed and ran and rode the wind currents up to stand on the head of the Skyfrost Nail. We couldn’t stay long; sheer cold accumulates fast up there, and neither Quentin nor I had brought a healer or a portable stove. But we still stayed, as long as we could, staring out over Teyvat.

Over the course of over four years of updates, scenery that had once been indistinct rolling hills and sea, fading into fog, had been replaced by new regions, sprawling far beyond our view. Quentin and I could just make out, in the distance, the towering Inazuman mountains, crested by the blossoming sacred sakuras of the Grand Narukami Shrine. The curving tree-city from which sprouts the Sumeru Akadeymia. The baroque arches and elevated crystalline waterways of the Court of Fontaine. And more besides – landmarks I had explored, that Quentin might one day explore: a view onto the entire world with all its colors and its vistas, chests and quests and every artifice of gameplay erased by distance.

Quentin teleported away to warmer pastures and I remained standing there, struck still and wordless, once again, by the syzygy.

He and I will never interact again (shortly, he would say, “Thank you Father” – a title often used for Arlecchino – and then kick me from the world). But for that brief moment, our experiences came into alignment with Genshin Impact, across time and very possibly national borders. I know even less about Quentin than I do Larissa Pham, but he and I at the very least got to share that moment of awe and wonder at the top of the world. I wonder what it meant to him.

In the prologue to Critical Hits, Carmen Maria Marchado writes about her experiences being introduced to new games by friends and partners: “As I keep writing I am struck… by the intimacy of the form; the way the experience of it is specific, even erotic. What did it mean to receive someone’s tutelage? To let yourself be watched? To open yourself up to new ways of understanding? To die over and over again?” Perhaps Critical Hits’ greatest strength, its most distinct quality as an art object, across almost every piece within, is that peculiar intimacy. To watch writers and critics open themselves up to games; then, through those games, open themselves up to you. In much the same way Quentin did by inviting me into his world, Pham and Villarreal and Adjei-Brenyah and Washuta and, yes, even Morson invite us into their worlds, show us how video games refracted their experiences to help them understand themselves with new vividity and clarity.

I feel a little guilty to have, once again, dedicated so much time and mental energy to Genshin Impact, a game which arguably does not deserve it. While playing it this year, and since then, I have played Signalis and Lies of P and 1000xResist and (fellow gacha game) Reverse:1999, have read Borges and Dillard and Ian Reid – artists and works that are considerably more unified and artistically compelling than Genshin. But none of them hit me quite as hard as this 2020 open-world live-service Chinese gacha game; none came at just the right moment, to connect with my particular experiences, my past; to color my vision.

My name didn't get called for jury duty, so at 3PM I rode the bus home (stopping briefly for bread and doughnuts at the bakery in order to earn the approval of the women I live with). Genshin Impact no longer lives on my computer. Once again, I got what I needed out of it, and then let it go. Having finished writing this piece, Critical Hits will be put on my bookshelf, probably never to be touched again. But as we move forward into an uncertain future, these small, impactful experiences, insignificant though they were, will continue to live with me. And if you read through this entire meandering essay, maybe some small fragment of them can live with you, too: proof of our shared essence, an invitation into my world.

I really love being able to see all sorts of stats -- number of games played, wins/losses, leaderboard rankings, even obscure stats.

I also love word, card, and puzzle games. Games like solitaire, for example, would be PERFECT candidates to lean heavily into the stats, but I just haven't been able to find a good one yet.

What are your favorite games in these categories? Bonus points if they have an emphasis on keeping records and stats.

Let's list some great mobile games. Preferably ones you can pay for once and be done, or free ones that have microtransactions that you don't need to do to just play the game (e.g. Marvel Snap). Leave out pay for power or games that have "charges" to stop you from playing until you buy more or burn time.

Edit: Thank you everyone for your suggestions! I compiled a list here that is, I believe, mostly Android. If you're looking for iOS only suggestions it looks like Apple Arcade was recommended regularly and also user Recognition101 had a comprehensive list I will refer you to: https://recognition101.github.io/ios-games/

Here is the Android Games List:
-Square Enix re-releases
-Stardew Valley
-Monster Hunter Stories
-Disgaea series remakes
-Vampire Survivors
-Slay the Spire
-Shattered Pixel Dungeon
-Slice and Dice
-Bloons series
-Sproggiwood
-Pysol FC
-Lexica
-Mindustry
-Overboard
-Old PC Game ports like Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, SW:KOTR 1 & 2
-Hoplite
-Simon Tatham's Puzzles
-Rogue Adventure
-Cultist Simulator
-Mini-Metro
-Wordament
-Retro Bowl
-Antiyoy
-Marvel Snap
-Star Realms
-Wingspan
-Team Fight Tactics
-Battle for Polytopia
-Where's My Water?
-Underhand
-Badland
-Eat Me Please
-Z Origins
-Yellow
-Dawncaster
-Ollie's Arcade
-Orna
-Night of the Full Moon
-A Dark Room
-The Ensign
-Universal Paperclips
-Opus: Rocket of whispers
-Opus: The day we found Earth
-TerraGenesis - Space Settlers
-Sheltered
-Seedship
-Framed
-Plague Inc.
-Gravity Defied
-Magic Research
-Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes
-Peglin
-Civilization series
-Rebel Inc.
-Boom Beach
-Professor Layton Series
-Slay
-Ritual

Game designers of tildes, lend me your aid.

My BIL, the life-insurance salesman, has decided to splurge on this year's family reunion and he is renting a castle in SW Ireland next summer. I have been given the task of designing and running a murder-mystery game on one night for the ~20 people who will be staying there. Salient facts:

I refer to my inlaws as the barking and snapping (Irish surname)'s. Hilarious but sarcastic to a fault. They have little patience for depth or lore or much historical detail. This will most successfully be a game of nasty betrayals and sudden twists and turns.

There's something like 18 rooms in the castle, with extensive grounds. But alas we will be there at the beginning of July so there will most likely be a lack of atmospheric ground fog. I love a good outdoor setting, so I will most likely try to get people running through the woods and across the lawns.

The family loves their games and takes them seriously but I figure this shouldn't last more than a couple hours or they will lose focus.

I haven't conducted one of these before but I have plenty of relevant experience. I want to keep it simple with a streamlined and elegant ruleset... but it's important to also find a moment somewhere near the end to scare the living shit out of all of them.

What I have so far: Discovering the Dead Body kicks it off. A couple obvious clues and a couple less-obvious ones will get people haring off into different rooms.

Each "player" has two modes. If the lighting is normal then they are playing as themselves and actively searching for the killer. If the lighting, however, is blacklight and the person within wears a black veil then they are ghosts, and must share a clue from a list on a card. All players will be ghosts at some point, including the Dead Body. If they enter a room with blacklight, on goes the veil.

I want to incorporate the history of the locale, as well as that of deeper legends. I mean, it's fucking Ireland. But I don't want the Disney version. One of my most successful history videos is about ancient Ireland so I'd love to incorporate something of the actual historical record instead of just a bunch of Celtic fantasy bullshit.

Some will be drunk, some sober. All will be barking and snapping. Piling on some poor defenseless unfortunate (usually one of the younger aunts or uncles or cousins) is their favorite entertainment. Subplots that subvert that bullying dynamic are also welcome.

Have any of you created an experience like this? How did you approach it? What kinds of ideas does it inspire in you?

Hey everyone,

Growing up, I loved playing board games with friends and family—it was a big part of my life. Now, I’ve moved away, and my girlfriend and some of her family (who live with us) have zero interest in board games.

I’ve tried classics like Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Codenames, but they’re not into them at all. I’m really craving some board game time, so I’m thinking about branching out to more approachable games.

Does anyone have suggestions for games that are fun and easy to ease non-gamers into without scaring them off? Or maybe I’m just not starting with the right type of games? Any advice is appreciated, thanks!

With Christmas around the corner I'm wondering if anyone has tabletop/card games they enjoy that are quick to play (in my mind less than 30 minutes). I enjoy longer games like Betrayal at House on the Hill immensely, but I'd like to add some games to my collection that are fun and light hearted, easy to learn, and idealy travel easy. I often play games with family over the holidays and want some that aren't as intimidating for my parents and older relatives to pick up and try. I often played with at least 2 other people, but I've been looking for fun 2 player games as well.

Can you please share what the gameplay is like and what you enjoy about playing it? Thanks all!

Like the title says, I played Taboo with my friends yesterday. It's decently fun, but every time I play it, the thing that sticks with me is how shocked I am that some players don't know what certain things are or how bad they are at thinking on their feet. On the plus side, it's also a chance for people who you'd unfairly judged to make a good impression.

What are some other games that have consequences like these that you haven't heard people discuss before?

Churchill Solitaire is a mobile game that you can play on Apple or Android devices. It came out in 2016. I found out about it in 2018. It had some very good reviews. It was mentioned that the game is difficult to beat. At the time I was playing some different solitaire games on mobile so I decided to try another. I paid $4.99 to unlock "all deals and free play".

The game is pretty good. $5 was a little expensive to pay for a game that only had one variation of solitaire. For example, I had the game Solebon Pro which has 160 variations. That game cost $10.

So Churchill Solitaire is not a great value. Not all games have the same value of course. But the reason I stopped playing it is because it charges you to get hints and undo moves. A game that is this hard just wastes your time if you can't undo. You can get quite near the end of a session and need to completely restart because you had several choices earlier and picked the wrong one.

Here is the In-App purchase list that is currently on the App Store in 2024. I don't remember if these prices were the same in 2018, but they are the current prices if you want to unlock any of the features:

• Undos - 15 Pack $0.99
• Hints - 15 Pack $0.99
• Undos - 100 Pack $5.99
• Hints - 100 Pack $5.99
• Unlock All Deals & Freeplay $4.99
• Game Pack 1 $0.99
• Daily Game (Monthly) $4.99
• Game Pack 2 $0.99
• Game Pack 3 $0.99
• Undos - 50 Pack $4.99

I understand that the developer should get paid money for unlocking the basic game. I understand that making additional winnable deals may take developer time (most deals are unwinnable in this game, but there is a "campaign" that has winnable deals). I understand that having a daily game may cost the developer to maintain servers and create winnable deals.

But I don't understand charging for hints or undos. I mean, I understand it from a greed perspective. But not from an "I respect the people who paid money for my game" perspective. Yes, I know about Candy Crush and all the other super addictive mobile games that are pay to win and farm money from whales. But this one just pissed me off in particular. This is the mobile game equivalent of heated seats in a BMW.

Since 2018 I've only bought 2 mobile games. So sorry other game devs, I don't even check the app store for games anymore.

Edit: It has been rightfully pointed out that this is a bit of a cranky post. I didn't make clear my intention. Maybe someone can recommend some recent small mobile games, like card or sudoku or something, that aren't pay to win. I am aware of one: Good Sudoku.