What games have you been playing lately?

[petra]

On a console, a phone, a tabletop -- what games lighten your hours?

Comments

[petra]

I've been playing Qwirkle nightly with my spouse, and Dungeons & Dragons weekly with a group of friends. I've also taken to playing pictionary online with another friend. Having some measure of interaction in with the gaming helps me feel less alone.

[bibliofile]

I know people who play games via video conference a lot. Mostly they were folks who needed to move away from their original spot but wanted to keep playing together, anyway. It's an advantage to living in the future, for sure.

Personally, I've been playing more on-my-phone games: I Love Hue (so soothing) and Top Word (word puzzle game). I Love Hue involves moving colored blocks around from chaos to orderly progressions -- and it uses some nice colors, too.

[petra]

I have a phone game called Blendoku that sounds similar to I Love Hue. Good to know where to look for another take on the same thing.

[althea_valara]

Daily puzzles in the various Flow Free & Flow Fit games. I've reached over 1000 days in the original Flow Free! And I absolutely flow Flow Fit:Sudoku.

I'm playing two mobile games. I've been playing Final Fantasy Brave Exvius for about three years now, I believe, and I'm still in love with the characters and the story. Speaking of the story, I've been documenting it at my other journal, here: althea_valara. Because the story is good enough that I want access to it forever, and being a mobile game, some day it is going to go away and that makes me sad. If anybody reading this plays FFBE and wants another friend, my ID is 965,432,229

The other mobile game I'm playing is War of the Visions. It's a spin-off of Brave Exvius that just launched about six weeks ago. I've been a bit too distracted to really play it, but I have been logging in for daily rewards, at least. I'm making an effort to get back to the game this weekend, as there is a short-term event that's ending soon.

Most of my time and energy goes to Final Fantasy XIV, though. I have two characters, Althea Valara on Coeurl and Eirian Ari on Brynhildr, both on the Crystal data center. The story is pretty darn good, and the gameplay is fun, though it took some getting used to for me. I was a former Final Fantasy XI player, which was the franchise's first MMO, and I was used to the flow of battles in that game. You'd set up camp somewhere, then a ranged attacker would pull mobs to the camp, the black mages would sleep the group of mobs, and you'd pick them off one by one. FFXIV is... flailing together as a group. You roam dungeons and AoE groups of mobs so there is no sleeping or picking off, and it's just different. I've been playing since September so I've gotten used to it now, but yeah, it was a learning curve for me.

I'm attempting a replay of Final Fantasy IX, but haven't found much time to play. I've scheduled myself to play some today. It is a gem of a game, and the lead character, Zidane, is so, so good and kind-hearted. He's a big flirt which I roll my eyes at sometimes, but his heart is pure, and he says: "You don't need a reason to help people."

Finally, I've been watching a streamer friend of mine play Final Fantasy XII:Zodiac Age. It's been fun watching him play, but I need to get on his case about using gambits. He's basically...not using them at all. Gambits are directives you give your party members, so for example you might tell one of them to "Cast Cure if a party member's health is below 70%". It's quite powerful and can make battles much easier, but he's been playing mostly manually. I am not sure how he has managed thus far, to be honest.

[petra]

It sounds like you have a wide range of things that bring you pleasure. That's great! I'm always intrigued to hear how other people spend their time.

[desireearmfeldt]

My LARPing friends have been running LARPs over webconference and Discord -- I'm about to go play one about star-wars-style fighter pilots, where the webconference modality is pretty much in-universe. Played one in discord last week that made interesting use of different modalities: a team of people investigating a haunted house, talking to each other over "walkie-talkies" (voice chat) while the ghosts could hear but not speak over audio, and communicated via text chat descriptions of physical stuff happening in each "room" (discord channel). It's been pretty interesting, seeing what can and can't be done via online platforms.

[petra]

Oo, that multi-modality LARP sounds like a great time. I love people's willingness to try new things in the face of the current Ick.

[desireearmfeldt]

Yeah, a lot of folks have leapt into "let's see what cool art we can do in this bad situation," and that's been very cheering.

[fred_mouse]

I have a time waster app on the tablet that is colour by number, and I'm quite enjoying doing a couple of those at lunch time.

[petra]

I try to think of such apps as time fillers rather than time wasters, because there have been long stretches where only turning my brain off would get me through the day.

[fred_mouse]

I don't think this one works for that kind of turning the brain off, because they've gone overboard in the gamifying it, and so it doesn't do a good job of filing time (there are speed related bonuses, and too many ads, and a whole lot of other things). I've used other colour by numbers games that were definitely time fillers though.