In this “beautiful” era of spelunking, booping, and flibbertigibbeting (read: waiting for AI to complete our tasks), I often procrastinate.
I like to think I do it in style, like productively (productive procrastination, anyone?) by playing these little fun games.
Chess games ♟️
I’m a chess enthusiast, and I play a lot of chess. I prefer 2+1 games because I enjoy chaotic clicking and thinking. Also, a 2+1 game is very short, up to 5 minutes, which is perfect for a small break.
I have a small game of my own: if I’m on a roll, I keep playing. As soon as I lose, I get back to work. It turns out that I’m playing quite well when I have the most tasks.
I’m using the Lichess platform since I heard the other one is evil.
I discovered a new chess-like game this year - Princechazz. You move around a board that has obstacles and try to capture other pieces without being captured yourself. When I first started playing this one, I was slightly addicted to getting the best score. My goal was to enter the top 10 every day. Now I just play it for fun.
Matle is a chess puzzle game where you have to add missing pieces to complete a chess position. As a chess lover, I often enjoy trying to solve this one in the fewest attempts possible.
Geography and history games 🗺️
MapTap is my favorite geography and history game. You have to tap on the globe as close as possible to the target place. The closer you guess, the more points you get. It has 5 rounds, and after the last one, every place reveals an interesting story about the location or someone from there, so you learn a bunch of new stuff. Kudos to the creator.
GeoGrid is another one that is a lot of fun. You have to fill a matrix of countries based on different criteria like the Human Development Index, coastline length, or the number of Olympic medals.
In Worldle, you are presented with a country shape, and you have to guess the country or territory. During the first round, you get hints about how far off you were and in which direction. After the first round, you answer questions about the country, like the capital city, currency, languages spoken, etc.
Flagle is a game where you guess the country by its flag, but the flag doesn’t reveal itself in full until the final guess in the first round. Like in Worldle, you get hints, and there are more rounds with more interesting questions.
There are two games with the same name that I play. The first WhereTaken game is about guessing the country based on an image. It’s similar to Worldle and Flagle with hints, but with fewer questions. The other WhereTaken game has five rounds where you get a picture, and you have one chance to guess the country.
My favorite guessing game is TimeGuessr. I’ve been playing it for years now. You are presented with a picture, and you have to guess the country and the year. It sounds hard, but you often have hints in the pictures, like window ads or flags, so you can guess more accurately.
Quiz games ❓
I enjoy a good quiz, be it a pub quiz or a TV quiz. Tightrope is a 10-question quiz game where you have three chances for error before you're out. I play this one early in the day to get my brain up to working temperature. The game has many common knowledge categories. I learned that I'm worst at English, but that might be because I'm not a native English speaker.
Word games 📖
Wordle is a classic one. Guessing a 5-letter word is still fun.
Sometimes I play other variants, like Quordle or Octordle. They are like Wordle, but you're guessing 4 or 8 words at once. These are often too hard for me.
I discovered another word game recently: 18 words. You get letters, and you have 30 seconds to find a word. It’s very exciting and sometimes a bit stressful.
I also played Scraple for a while, where you have to think of words from given letters and score as many points as possible, though not so much these days.
Number games 1️⃣
Numble is the only number game I play. You get 6 numbers which you can use to get the target number using only (, ), -, +, /, and *. It’s a fun game because it also shows you how fast you were at getting the correct result. It has a hard mode, which is not so fun because I have to use a calculator for that one, which defeats the purpose.
Honorable mentions 🖊️
I often solve sudoku and crossword puzzles during holidays. I don’t do these on a screen. I like to solve them on paper. And on a beach, if possible. 🏖️