Recent reviews by Jonman[GWJ]

Incredibly slick and polished Go game. An excellent primer for beginners, with tutorials explaining the basic and advanced concepts of the game, and hundreds upon hundreds of Tsumego - exercises for training your Go muscles.

The AI scales to all level players, multiplayer is present and correct and the hooks into OGS let you use this polished UI as an interface into your usual internet Go games.

It really is a one-stop shop for all your Go needs.

It's Civ blended with a deckbuilder, and it works remarkably well.

Unlike Civ, a game is easily complete-able, with most full runs taking way less than an hour, as opposed to actual Civ where most players never even see the end game. It plays a lot nippier than a full 4X, with almost no micromanagment, and that's much to it's benefit.

Downsides? It doesn't have the legs of Civ - after a while you figure out your early-game tactics, and it can become a little rote, but it's still punchy enough to be enjoyable for a quick blast of 4X goodness.

Highly recommended.

Incredibly compelling for such a simple game. It strips down the deckbuilding model right to the studs, almost like an autobattler (except without the tedious bit where you have to watch the battle play itself), focusing entirely on the interesting choices in the draft.

Furthermore, it keeps layering in more and more stuff as you progressively beat higher and higher difficulty levels.

An absolute joy of a game! It tickles the joys of a deckbuilder without getting bogged down in a meta or relying on unlikely card combos and overstuffed decks. It tickles the joys of a tactics game, with the enemies telegraphing their next move - on your first run, you'll be relying on this, on your fiftieth, you'll be able to predict many moves in advance how the enemies will respond, and slaughter the lot of them without getting a single scratch.

The game actively rewards high-level play, without mandating it, and you can muddle through just fine on the lower difficulties that you'll need to pass in order to unlock the harder runs. The achievements offer alternative twists on the ruleset if you're looking for entirely optional further challenges (e.g. finish a run without ever turning around, for instance).

"Real world thing but we pasted on a Roguelike" is the hotness right now. Balatro did it for Poker, Luck Be A Landlord did it for a slot machine, Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers did it for blackjack, Peglin did it for pachinko.

Now comes Rack & Slay, which does it for pool/billiards. And it works dang well! It's a shorter run-time than many of it's competitors, but that works in it's favor. Challenge is set fairly easy out of the gate, but a couple hours in I'm hitting challenging difficulties after clearing the easier difficulties - on that note, each run lets you select a 0-20 difficulty level (with the higher levels gated behind successful completions of the easier levels) - I found that the levels available out of the box to be comically easy, but once I hit the mid-teens, it got hard and required me to play smart if I wanted to succeed.

Short but sweet Minesweeper in 3D. Glossy presentation, minimal aesthetic, priced appropriately, great stuff!

Basic sokoban puzzles. Nothing revolutionary here but for a buck or less, there's plenty puzzles to give you your moneysworth.

Neat puzzle game that feels fresh and different. Pretty aggressively ugly 8-bit pixel graphics, but the puzzlin' is worth the eye-bleeding palette.

Love this game!

Feels very fresh to weave classic Sokoban style puzzles into a bigger, coherent world. I'm so used to those kinds of puzzle games being a series of unrelated standalone levels that it feels revolutionary for them to be interlinked like this.

And a word on those puzzles, they're fabulous. There's so much more you can do with this genre of puzzle once you get away from standalone levels.

The art style is :chefkiss: , the learning curve is pitched just right, the self-tutorializing the game does is so subtle and well balanced. Can't recommend it enough.

Best offroad game on the market, hands down.

And I say that with nearly 200 hours in Dirt Rally 2.0, which was my favorite racing sim of the last decade. WRC builds on that brilliance, carrying over the fabulous physics model and feel, and building out a way more comprehensive set of ways to play - an actual career mode, challenges (called "moments") and of course, the return of asynchronous online clubs, which is where I spend most of my time.

Even supports VR (albeit in a slightly rough around the edges fashion as of this writing - works great for me, I know some friends who've not gotten on well with it).