I started attempting to keep track of all the games I’ve been playing each year - it ends up adding up to a lot! You gotta stay current, ya know? Obviously, I didn’t play all of these in equal amounts, and in many cases I barely played them at all (for various reasons). For PC & mobile games I tried to distinguish between ones I legitimately played multiple times for a reasonable amount of time, vs ones I just dipped my toe into.

PC

Actually played

• Civilization 5 (vanilla, co-op) - I’d played Civ 5 before, but this was the first time playing it co-op with a friend, and it worked remarkably well despite my worries about pacing. Civ 2 is still the best Civ there is, but 5 is pretty damn good.
• Prismata - Not sure how to describe this except as a mashup between a card game, RTS, and Dominion (shared central pool of cards), except it’s not a deckbuilding game, there’s no randomness, and there is perfect information. It’s neat - give it a try!
• Gunpoint - I played and beat this, but I always felt like I was brute forcing my way through the puzzles instead of being very clever. But the story is actually pretty great, and the wiring mechanic is a lot of fun to play with.
• Smite - Played this a few times with a few friends who had never played any MOBAs, and the biggest takeaway for me is that 3rd-person/1st-person action controls are way more familiar to most people than RTS/top-down controls, and they also provide a much more immediately satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay. This group of friends (I don’t think) would ever want to play League of Legends, but Smite was at least interesting enough to hook them for a while.
• Borderlands: Pre-Sequel (co-op) - This was bad and you shouldn’t play it. I don’t know what happened between Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, but the group of us that finished Borderlands 2 together, played a few hours of this and never looked back. On the plus side I got to play as Claptrap which was pure insanity.
• Luftrausers - A very well-done Vlambeer arcade shoot-em-up with a weird alternate World War II wrapping. Recommend.
• Heroes of the Storm - I got SUPER into this for awhile, and was playing every day at work over lunch. I particularly like (1) the shorter game length vs LoL, and (2) Stitches. Once I earned my Stitches Master Skin, I stopped. A lesson in goals and motivation in games.
• Borderlands 2 (co-op again) - Early on in the year we were desperately hunting for new co-op games to play, and playing Borderlands 2 again seemed like the best option, despite having beaten it once already. It didn’t last long enough the second time around for me to beat it again, but I did learn some obscure mechanics like health-gating from this Zer0 melee build guide (which I unfortunately never got high enough level to try and implement).
• Crypt of the Necrodancer - Rhythm game + roguelike, with an amazing soundtrack. One of my favorite games this year, and usually under $5 when it’s on sale on Steam.
• Don’t Starve: Together - I guess I’m not sure what I expected. A few friends and I tried to get into this but it was so damn hard to get any kind of sustainable town going that it always ended being hours of desperately eking by before everyone died and we had to start over again. It didn’t help that none of us had played Don’t Starve before, but the learning curve was too steep on this one for us.
• World of Tanks (for real this time) - I tried World of Tanks exactly once years ago, but at the urging of our head of game design at work, I gave it another shot. WoT is worth playing particularly for learning about the monetization and progression systems. The actual combat ends up being interesting once you know what is going on (but the vast majority of mechanics are never explained unless you read an absurdly long wiki).
• Hammerwatch (co-op) - Kept us entertained for a few sessions, but ultimately there wasn’t enough variety in the play or character builds to keep me coming back. It was definitely worth the few bucks it cost though.
• Hearthstone (again) - I never got really into Hearthstone, but the Tavern Brawl mechanic was a really nice touch that made me venture back a little. It serves a bit of the same purpose that ARAM mode in League of Legends does for me - not super serious (like Ranked or Arena), but still interesting for casual players. (Plus you get a pack every week!)
• Overwatch - I wrote a long article on Overwatch here. I very much liked it, and am excited to see how the game changes toward launch next year.
• Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin - I’ve put about 16 hours in and am nowhere near close to finishing this game. This is another game I never would have played but for someone at work pushing it on me. I’m glad I did (it’s the best combat I’ve experienced in a game), though I have to be in the right mood to sit down and play. This Gamasutra article does a great job of selling the game.
• NEO Scavenger - I just picked this up near the end of the year and so I haven’t put too much time in yet, but I’ve always loved the idea of this kind of game. The atmosphere, mechanics, feel. So far the interface is the only thing really getting in the way of me enjoying the game, but I haven’t tried to learn all the hotkeys yet. I’m also not a big fan of the crafting system so far (it seems quite tedious), but hope to put in some more time exploring this year.
• Far Cry 4 (co-op) - Zach and I play a lot of co-op games together, and Far Cry 4 was our latest. The co-op experience is much better than Far Cry 3 in that you can actually play through the real game together, clearing outposts in one friend’s game. You can’t progress the main questline, but that’s far less interesting than working together to take enemy camps. It makes me wonder why there aren’t more games out there like it. Also, the environment is beautiful.

Tried

• World of Warships - Didn’t need another World of Tanks grind, and I like tanks more than ships anyway.
• How to Survive - Never got sucked into this, and I may never make it back. I hear there is a co-op mode coming though, and I’m always a sucker for that.
• Witcher 3 (very briefly) - Got a free copy, played less than an hour, and then wandered off to play other things. I’ll probably come back and play this for real at some point, but it requires such an investment that I wasn’t ready for yet.
• Wargame: European Escalation - I’m still not sure how this game works.
• Duelyst - Loved the graphical style, didn’t want another Hearthstone-style grind for a game that I wasn’t that excited to play. Tactics-style games have never been my particular jam.
• Supernova (Bandai Namco) - Another take on a F2P MOBA. What the world needs is more MOBAs.
• Dirty Bomb - F2P class-based shooter, but with a weird F2P bent. Classes you get can be the same name but different rarities of the same class can have different loadouts and perks (e.g., the Bronze version of a class has more perks than the Lead version). You can open boxes to try and get higher rarity versions, or craft your way there. The highest rarities don’t gain more perks or power, only cosmetic differences. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is.
• World of Guns: Gun Disassembly - I don’t know, I got this for free somehow. It was oddly soothing.

Console

• Destiny [PS4] (co-op w/ Zach) - I decided I needed to play more console games to see how the other half lives. Destiny is actually pretty fun - who knew? The story is garbage, but the combat feels great (even though I am absolutely abysmal with a controller) and the progression systems have distilled a lot of what was great about WoW into a concentrated experience. It’s also the first console game I played that really felt alive and run as a game-as-a-service. I suspect I’ll be playing this for some time yet.
• Just Dance 2016 [PS4] - There is nothing better to make you look like a complete fool than Just Dance + the PS4 camera.
• Nintendoland [Wii U] - The co-op games in the bundle are meh but the 4v1 games are really fun and put the gamepad to great use. One player uses the gamepad and sees a different set of things on their screen, and the other players look at the TV and generally have to work together in some way to defeat the player on the gamepad.
• Super Smash Bros [Wii U] - It’s still Smash, it’s still fun, and I’m still terribly bad at fighting games.
• Mariokart 8 [Wii U] - Another excellent entry in the Mariokart series. It’s slightly easier in the sense that they removed some of the tricks from the earlier games (pressing ‘B’ when you hit a banana, and the power sliding mechanics are simply time-based), but it’s still a lot of fun. The DLC is also worth it, and in particular 200cc is completely insane. Everything you know about driving in 150cc goes out the window.

Mobile (iOS)

I played all of these on iOS but most of them are available for Android as well.

Actually played

• Heroes Charge - A clone of a Chinese game (Dota Legend) that itself steals all the characters/abilities from Dota, which in turn takes a lot of characters and icons from Warcraft III. Nevermind the lineage, the real interesting thing here is the progression system. In Heroes Charge, the progression system is the game. And it’s actually a pretty fun one at that, though in the end you realize it’s an endless treadmill. But while it lasts, it is a fantastic example of continual power progression, fragmented loot drops, VIP systems, different gameplay modes that force different team mechanics, and Chinese-style rolling servers and leaderboards.
• Game of War (still) - I was playing this for competitive intelligence in 2014, and at least through the first part of 2015, I was still playing. This is another game like Heroes Charge in the sense that what we might traditionally view as the “game” is garbage, and it’s the systems surrounding it that make it fun (for some people). For Game of War it’s the social systems around guilds, server-vs-server battles, and chat that make it worth understanding. It also prints money and has terrible TV ads.
• Battleheart: Legacy - Action-RPG with surprising amounts of character customization. Apparently the end-game class customization is quite interesting, but I got really turned off by the early grind.
• DomiNations - The best Clash-like I played last year. It’s really an incremental change on top of Clash, and so it could only keep my attention for so long (I am so tired of playing Clash clones), but it’s still a decent entry.
• Marvel Contest of Champions - I tried to get into this. I’m not into comics, and so a lot of the appeal is lost on me. The fighting mechanics are the same as Injustince (on iOS), which I’d already played, and I really wasn’t interested in grinding out fight after fight to level up my characters.
• AdVenture Capitalist - 2015 was a year of incremental games for me. A friend from work recommended this to me, and I got fairly obsessed for a solid couple of months. (This game is also available on Steam.)
• Tap Titans - This was even worse for my sanity than AdVenture Capitalist. The one drawback with Tap Titans is that it’s an incremental game where the longer you play the more you actually have to engage. Unlike most incremental games, in Tap Titans, at higher levels your tap contributes so much damage (vs the automatic systems) that you have no choice but to play to progress, which is kind of backwards. Still, I think incremental games are a really interesting space, and Tap Titans is one worth playing.
• You Must Build a Boat - Played 10 Million and loved it. This is mostly more of the same. One neat takeaway is how it gives players a sense of reward as you collect monsters that inhabit your larger and larger boat. They do absolutely nothing, but you feel awesome about your progress. It’s an incredibly cheap way to reward players and give them something to revel in when they log back in.
• The Room Two - I didn’t finish this, but I enjoyed playing it on the train for a few weeks. Puzzle games like this one aren’t normally my cup of tea, but the production quality on The Room Two won me over enough that I was engaged for at least awhile. The problem with these kinds of games I have is that they ultimately get so complicated that it’s a matter of trial and error and poking around to get anywhere.
• Out There: Omega Edition - I played this in 2014, and never beat it. I came back in 2015 and tried again, and failed again. Given my failures also trying to beat FTL (it involves me forgetting that you can pause the game), I’m wondering if space-themed roguelikes just aren’t my thing.
• Mavenfall - Collect Mavens (characters) who each have their own custom deck of cards that you can modify, and play a turn-based PvP game with them. It’s a cute idea, but the execution is unfortunately flawed - there isn’t enough to do in the game once you finish the very short number of single player levels except to play PvP, but the vast majority of low level PvP matches are vs bots who aren’t even playing with a full team of characters. Sadly I think this game is destined to die soon, unless they add a lot more to the game and get more favorable re-featuring from Apple.
• Dream Quest (again) - This game is so incredibly good. I played it in 2014, and I played it again in 2015. It’s a expertly done combination of roguelike and Dominion-style deckbuilding, with a light amount of metagame progression thrown in. The art is, uh, lo-fi, but you’re going to have to trust me. If anything I said above sounds remotely interesting, you have to play this game. It’s that good.
• Eternal Arena - There have been a spate of successful Chinese iOS games lately that basically follow this pattern (this is the only one in English I can play):
  • 1) Make a virtual stick ARPG
  • 2) Make a MOBA built around it (use League of Legends if you need handy references for characters, items, whatever)
  • 3) Add everything you already know about Chinese-style progression (see Heroes Charge above)
  • 4) Profit
• SongPop 2 - My wife and I play this together and stomp fools with our collective music knowledge. Something about the ticket economy doesn’t feel right in this game though - I feel like they could get a lot of value out of re-tuning it, BUT WHAT DO I KNOW.

Tried

• Star Wars Card Trader - I just can’t care. I tried. For research. I get that it’s successful. But I also get that it’s Star Wars, and that makes people do crazy things.
• Fallout Shelter - Sadly continuing the trend of “I don’t like all Fallout games after Fallout 1 & 2″. Maybe Fallout 4 will be different.
• Auro - Tried this briefly but I was on an airplane and all the advanced tutorials are videos that required an internet connection. So I never really got what was going on. I’ll probably revisit this in 2016 though.
• Alphabear - As far as word games goes, Alphabear is decent, though I am predisposed to like anything that Spry Fox makes. I think I just don’t like word games enough to get deeply enough into them.
• Stormborn - Played the tutorial, saw it was another Clash clone (BUT WITH MORE HEROES), moved on.

Board / Card

• Eight-minute Empire: Legends - I’ve only played this twice so far, but it’s an easily portable, quick strategy game that also comes with some expansions built in. I usually like heavier board games, but the portability of this is nice.
• Caverna - I generally like this more than Agricola, and there are some new mechanics (like adventuring) that are really interesting. The thing that I sometimes miss from Agricola is the feeling that you’ve done something terribly wrong and oh god your family is going to starve oh god I hope no one takes day laborer or I’m totally screwed. Caverna is an embarrassment of riches by comparison, but still highly strategic and a lot of fun. It is, however, extremely heavy and decidedly NOT portable.
• Exploding Kittens - I got this at a white elephant gift exchange. It seems better than Uno (I know, not high praise), but I’ve only played it once with two players (which seems pretty boring). Play it for the puns and the art, and then move on to…
• Hanabi - The first co-op board/card game I’ve played that I actually like. Most co-op games have the problem of one or two people dominating the planning and everyone else kind of just going along. This is ultimately why I stopped playing and sold my copy of Pandemic. But in Hanabi it’s literally impossible for one person to dominate since everyone has some missing information (you play with your hand of cards showing to all other players but not yourself). It’s also extremely portable.
• Codenames - I’ve only played this a few times at a friend’s house, but it was a ton of fun. It’s a very different kind of game (sort of a different take on Taboo but with less verbal diarrhea), and it’s remarkable that it’s designed by the same guy who also designed Through the Ages, Mage Knight, and many other vastly different games. Absolutely recommend (and I’ll probably have to buy my own copy soon).
• Concept - My wife and I also played this the same night we played Codenames with some friends - it’s more of a group activity than a game (the way we played it), but it was still quite interesting. You are basically trying to describe concepts that range from simple (apple) to hard (”It’s not the end of the world”) through pointing at a series of icons. Bonus tip: This is also fun to try doing with Cards Against Humanity cards.
• Bang! - I can sort of see why this game is so popular - it’s a very accessible gateway game that is better than most “American” card games (again, like Uno) but if you’ve played a lot of European style board games or card games, it’ll probably be a little basic. However, when I played it we only had 4 people which meant the hidden role part of the game was rendered kind of pointless - with more people (and more roles) there is an interesting Mafia/Resistance/Werewolf element layered on top of everything, which seems really neat.
• Magic: the Gathering (Winston, Sealed) - I’ve played Magic for a long time, and this year was no different. We run a fairly large Sealed tournament at work every expansion, I mostly use it as an excuse to buy packs of every new set. Origins was particularly good to me - I opened 2 Jaces in my packs. I also got to play a Winston draft for the first time, which is a really neat 2-player draft variant that I hope to more with new sets.

Other

• Kittens Game - The Dark Souls of incremental gaming.
• TF2 Hat Idling Game - I like hats. This is not a very good incremental game. But it does have hats.
• Swarm Simulator - A neat take on incremental games in that it upends the traditional model of building up higher and higher value production systems - you can sacrifice higher value pieces to improve the production efficiency of lower value pieces, which you can then spend on making more high value pieces, etc. Also has some other neat things like the prestige system, and spell-casting.