Games I played in 2025, Part 1/2

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Some of my most played games for the first six months of 2025.

Only some 15 times so far this year, and not at all since May. I tried to cut down a bit on this, first by forcing myself to only play at most once every week. Still only managed to win once, and that was several years ago, with probably 500+ failed attempts since.

From what I understand, this collection has been around since 2004. I only learned about it some months ago when someone mentioned it in a comment somewhere. Very nice collection! It seems to be packaged for many Linux distributions and there is a FreeBSD package as well and there is an Android APK. This is the only Android game I have played so far this year, or in several years really, excluding old DOS games I played in DOSBox Magic.

Same as all years. Making some progress through the end-game. I hope my party is strong enough to be able to win. Maybe in 2025 or 2026 I will finally see the end of this game that I started playing over a quarter of a century ago. Daydreaming a bit about what my next CRPG will be after this one.

Realized that I have never played any of the games in Dan Versen's popular Leader Series of solitaire card games. The printed games are a bit difficult to find around here (post Kickstarters campaigns anyway). Some of the games can be bought in digital versions to be played in VASSAL instead. That is a bit unusual, as normally VASSAL modules are provided for free for boardgames (with the expectations that players own the boardgame). Dan Versen Games instead sells VASSAL modules. Playing those is an experience somewhere between playing a physical game and a digital game. There is no rules enforcement, so you have to know all the rules and manually move components around on the screen. A nice thing about VASSAL is that there is no DRM and unlike most other virtual tabletop systems there is no attempt to control what games are played in it. VASSAL itself is open source and has been in active development for 25 years or so. It is also just a stand-alone desktop application, not depending on any kind of app-store or cloud service. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Leader game I wanted to try before settling on Phantom Leader Deluxe (published in 2013). It is a lot of fun. Great at generating random, difficult, tactical puzzles.

tags: #games