What we played – surfing, line riding and house parties

September 20

Hello! Welcome back to our regular column where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve played over the last few days. This week I got the great Christian Donlan to write it all up! Look, he offered, OK? We did a trade, a secret trade. So this week it’s a Donlan special, and he’s surfing, connecting lines, and throwing house parties (that I wasn’t invited to?).

What have you been playing?

View older editions of this column in our ‘What We’ve Played’ archive.

Microsoft Edge Surfing, PC

My PC blew up last week, which wasn’t fun. Then I had to buy a new one, which was surprisingly even less fun. Is there anything more stressful than trying to pick out a new PC?

One of the good things that came out of it, though, was the discovery of this surfing game, er, Surf, that Microsoft flies your way when you download updates for your new PC. It’s a very simple endless running game, and it seems to be based on SkiFree, and it popped up in my life when I was feeling pretty stressed and irritated and anxious. It popped up and lightened things up for a few minutes, and I’m very grateful for that.

By the way, you can also play the game if you don’t have a new PC, but then you will need Microsoft Edge.

-Donlan

Oxytone, iOS

Oxytone reminds us that there are dozens of great games released for smartphones every day and it’s very easy to overlook them.

Missing something as good as this, for example, would be a real loss. Oxytone is a sort of mix between those old Pipe Mania games and something like Dorfromantik. You place hexes on the screen, each containing a tangle of lines. You try to pull a specific line to travel back and forth across the map without reaching an end point.

It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t: you simply place hexes and rotate them to get the lineups that look most promising. You can learn the game and improve steadily just by playing it.

More than anything, I live for the combo system in this game. When your line goes back and takes you through a number of tiles you’ve already laid, you get this ascending ring of notes and your score goes through the roof.

Oxytone has something otherworldly about it and I think it’s a work of genius. If you don’t like it on your smartphone, I think it’s also available on PC and Switch.

-Donlan

Party house in UFO 50, PC

It’s impossible to do What We Played This Week without picking up UFO 50.

Party House is my favorite right now. It’s a deck building game that took me a long time to realize was a deck building game. That’s because it’s also a game about throwing a house party, inviting guests, and hoping that the guests will collectively generate enough popularity and money to keep throwing parties.

It’s all about creating synergies between guests, pairing them up to boost each other’s stats, relying on guests who have useful actions, and avoiding guests who cost you resources or who can cause conflict with other guests. Inevitably, though, I lose games because I get too caught up in the fiction. I start creating house parties full of my favorite guests, no matter how well they match. Still, compulsive, strange, and fascinating stuff!

-Donlan