Thanks for this, very useful for a longtime but casual player like me. The wiki links are very handy.

When you buy a game on GOG you are paying for a license to use the software, just like on Steam. The difference is that Valve or the game's publisher will be able to more readily enforce the conditions if they choose to. This is of course an important distinction in practice but we shouldn't have illusions about what we really "own".

I like to complain about new things but after using 2.0 for a few days I am forced to grudgingly acknowledge that in this case the new version is indeed better.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (plus DLCs): Nothing else comes close to the item variety and more importantly the item combinations and synergies you get in this game. Sure, there are a bunch of items that are just stat boosts, many other games stack these. But in Isaac you also get stacking and synergies on weird weapon and item effects that can sometimes lead to almost game breaking outcomes. And then you still manage to die.

Because of this Isaac excels at the "just one more run" style replayability.

I could love UBERMOSH if it wasn't for the screenshake that cannot be disabled. According to the developer the shake is part of the design and difficulty balancing which I understand but it makes it very difficult for me to stick with the game for more than 60 seconds at a time. I picked up the deal anyway, I just wish I could play the games more.

Oh, I am willing to wait as long as it takes. What's more, I am ready to take my wishlists into the grave with me. Your move publisher, do you want your $0.99 or not.

My favorite tool is rss2email (and similar tools that provide the same functionality). The idea is to fold RSS feeds into your email workflow. This way RSS feed items are just email messages under their tags/labels, no dedicated RSS client to worry about. This makes sense if you are comfortable and happy with your email workflow.

I also have a small CLI utility to quickly dump a feed to stdout in a human friendly format. I need to clean up and publish this sometime but I am sure there are many other similar tools out there already.

For lane battlers where you mix sub-decks my favorite is Riftforce, especially once you add the expansion to increase the number of available factions. The factions are drafted and each player ends up with 4 factions. Cards from a given faction share the same power but have different strengths. This gives a good variety of abilities but since there are only 8 in a given game they are still easy to keep track of and plan for.

Tyrants of the Underdark, is a bit different but I like it a lot: a river-market style deckbuilder where the market deck is a mix of two themed decks. The current edition comes with 6 factions.

If you are open to coop/solo then Marvel Champions is somewhere halfway into this direction. Each hero comes with a small preset deck and you then customize this by picking cards from exactly one of the four aspects (factions) available in the game.

Picked up Yoku's Island Express during the sale. A unique 2D platformer/exploration game that seamlessly incorporates pinball mechanics. The world feels big with a lot of variety. The pinball stuff is fun and works better than I though it would. Great production. Very happy with the value so far.

Another new one to me is Downwell. This is a neat little game and it's good at what it does but can't help feeling that it could have been a lot more if it had more items that combined in fun ways. It was very inexpensive so I am happy with this one too and will keep it in the rotation, especially for short play sessions.

And of course more Isaac, my most played on the deck by far.

To help narrow it down I'd try streaming a low-end game that runs very well locally and doesn't tax the system. If this doesn't stream well either that would suggest that it's something specific to the streaming setup, perhaps a networking issue.

Great list! I will add Wildfrost and LONESTAR on the roguelite, "there's gotta be a way to survive this turn, if only I could figure it out" side. Wildfrost is at the historical low, LONESTAR is not quite but close.

I only played A Feast for Odin extensively but I disagree on that one: our playtimes are much closer to the 90-120 minutes on the box than the 3-5 hours claimed by the article. I don't think that we ever had a game go over 3 hours. Once everybody is comfortable with the basics and at least one player knows the rules well enough to quickly clear up any details the game flows very smoothly for us. The number of meeples is not a problem at all, the article neglects to mention that most worker placement spaces require multiple meeples so the 5-12 you get per turn are gone after a few actions.