Games
Table Top Games
Settlers of Catan (pictured left) is a resource / civilization strategy game. You take on the role of one of competing civilizations (colors) all trying to gain resources to upgrade your society. Two warnings about this game: 1.) It's really fun! 2.) There are a bazillion expansions that you can (will) buy.
Exploding Kittens is a card game about kittens that explode. Yup. You read that right: the kittens will explode, and they will take you with them. Can you avoid a cat-astrophe?
Munchkin's tagline is "Kill the Monsters. Steal the Treasure. Stab Your Buddy." Sounds like a good time! There may be one or two puns involved... per card. Also, there are a bazillion and twenty expansions.
Tsuro is a tile-based, last-man-standing game. Every turn, you place one tile in front of your piece, and move along the path that you have just made. If another player is in front of a path, they move too. This is where the strategy comes in. Can you place a tile such that your piece moves safely, but forces your opponents to move off the board?
Settlers of Catan
(in my custom box)
Tsuro
Exploding Kittens
Munchkin
(in my custom box)
Bears vs Babies
In Bears vs Babies, you have to construct your monsters (e.g. a Saucy Sombrero wearing Panda Bear Ready to Do Some Lumberjacking Wearing Spooky Cat Feet) to save yourself from the horrible attacking baby armies!
Forbidden Island
Imagine this: you play a game and have to work together to win! Forbidden Island is an actual co-op game. The players either all win or all lose. As you play this game, tiles begin flooding and sinking, which makes moving around the play area increasingly hard. You have to work together to keep as much of the island shored up as you need to extract the four treasures.
RPGs
Role-Playing Games and Roll-Playing Games, I've been playing them since, approximately, forever. For the folks who have never played an RPG, and are wondering what the deal is, it's basically communal story telling where conflict (between story tellers) is resolved by physical Random Number Generators (dice). Current system of choice: FFG's Genesys.
Of course, with the need to be able to play remotely, the physical RNG's need to get replaced with digital RNG's. This is why I built vanlevy.com and the Kobolds Easy Char (character generator). For more on those, see my Gaming Apps page.
Computer Games
Subnautica (pictured right) is maybe the prettiest game I have ever played. It's a first person survival game that starts after your survival pod crashes down on an uncharted oceanic planet.
Kerbal Space Program is an awesome physics simulator game. Since I started playing KSP, I have learned things like "perigee", "apogee", "ascending node", "little green men", and "explosively failed".
The Civilization Series (currently Civ VI) This is a cool "history simulator" game. You pick the persona of a real historical leader and try to take over the world! The folks behind the Civ series games are huge history buffs and try to keep the game details as accurate as game-play allows.
No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated space exploration game that started out with a rough launch, to be honest. There were a bunch of features that were promised but not delivered. However, the developers got their heads down and have been turning out expansions that more than make up for the lost features, in my (not-so) humble opinion.
There are a zillion other games I've played. Divinity Original Sin (1 & 2), Minecraft (vanilla and modded), Master of Orion, Might and Magic X, Phasmophobia (AMAZING new horror-ghost hunting game!), Wizardry, Zork Grand Inquisitor (to name a few); even old-school FPS games like Duke Nukem, Doom, Counter-Strike...
Do I have a problem. Yes. Not enough time to play more games.
Subnautica
Kerbal Space Program
Civilization V
No Man's Sky
Portal 2
If you haven't played the Portal games, what have you been doing with your life? This may be my favorite game series of all times. In case you've never played: you solve problems using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (a gun that shoots holes. Not bullet holes, but-- well, you'll figure it out.) If you haven't played these games, you should. Why?
For Science.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Fus Ro Damn I love this game! Who wouldn't want to run around a frozen medieval fantasy world slaying dragons, stealing their souls, and shouting their enemies to bits? Skyrim is the fifth major game in the Elder Scrolls universe. What makes the Elder Scrolls universe so amazing to play in is that, with almost 25 years of developing games in the same universe, the depth of history and cultures is one of the most immersive I've ever seen.