Once Upon a Galaxy is my new favorite. Not sure why it has bad/mixed reviews because they don't pay wall anything it seems like. You never play against cards you don't own and all the characters unlock for free every few months. You only spend money if you want to play new stuff RIGHT NOW, but I've found there's a lot of variety already.

Anywho, it's an autobattler where you pick a champion with an ability. Then, you're presented with two shops each round where you can choose fighters and spells. Your fighters then battle against other teams. The winner will replenish 1/2 a heart if it's already been reduced by half, but not if it's empty. If the winner has 2 or less fighters survive, the loser loses 1/2 a heart. If the winner has 3 or more, the loser loses a full heart, but only if the heart was already full, otherwise it's the remaining half. Lose all 3 hearts and you're eliminated.

Each fighter has bronze, silver, and gold versions you level up into each time you select them from the shop. You get a new shop any time you choose a silver upgrade. Once they're upgraded to gold, you choose among three items equal to the fighter's tier. You can also get items by completing quests for certain fighters, like dealing 6 damage in a round or recruiting three villains from the shop.

The main way to win is to get as many bonus shops each turn, especially through abilities and items. It's a simple enough mechanic, yet there's all these combos and stuff you can do to get more upgrades than your opponents. Each player is recruiting from the same pool of fighters, so you want to be the one who has accessed more shops to inch out an advantage.

It's free and uses asynchronization, so you can play at your own pace each game to think about your choices.

Playing backrooms excape together with my partner rn actually

Still working my way through Dragon Quest II. I'm a pretty good ways into the game so far and I like it a lot more than Dragon Quest I. It feels a lot less grindy and I'm enjoying the variety in monsters. Pretty harsh game though, your party members will drop dead instantly if you aren't careful. It feels like the best strategy a lot of the time is to just smack with the player character and defend with the other two, then heal up after. There's still times when there are other good strategies though, and having party members at all gives you more freedom in how you approach things, and I like that they each have strengths and weaknesses (even if they aren't super well balanced about it) so still a big step up from DQ1 for me. They give you no room for items either despite there being a lot of key items. I still haven't even tried the lottery yet because I only have room for a couple consumables and I've been holding on to them for emergencies lol. Still though, I'm liking it. The harshness of the game plays well into the general hopeless vibe the game's setting has in my opinion.

Started Expedition 33. Almost gave up during the intro because it took me so many attempts to beat Maella at the festival. Turns out the fight is harder than anything in act 1.

going through the first areas of act 3 of bg3, took some fun detours like liberating Scratch’s courier dog friends without getting into combat with the city guards, it would not be a druid playthrough without doing that, took a bit of effort because they always attack their oppressive keeper before running away, had to buff and bless them from the roof so they’d survive the fight, also procured a landlord’s body to a hungry young mind flayer, earlier the landlord walked into an insect plague spell after he paid some mercs to kick out refugees from his house and start a fight, also everyone from the zentharim or dealing with them gets the smokepowder barrel treatment, they smuggled it into act 1 so what goes around comes around

Currently playing through Red Faction with the Alpine Faction mod that makes it play nice on modern PCs. I feel like if Red Faction 2 didn't suck, people would remember Red Faction in the same vein as Half-Life.