Recently, one of my relatives has retired. In order to keep her mind active and sharp, she aims to play puzzle and strategy games. Knowing that I play a number of them, she's asked me to list some, with brief descriptions for each. Here, then, in alphabetical order, is my list of sixteen or so that I play, want to play or have played. (I'm not including any titles from The Sims series in this, since the person in question is already familiar with them.)

Disclaimer

I have received neither commission nor sponsorship for writing this article. All views expressed herein are my own and do not reflect those of the respective game developers, publishers or studios.

1. Bridge Constructor Portal [Clock Stone & Head Up]

Take Portal, with its gallows humour and unhelpful "help" from the sardonic GladOS. Add Bridge Constructor, with its physics-based civil engineering puzzles. Dissolve well in deadly green corrosive fluid and launch the concoction against a wall.

If you're expecting 'Chelle crossing bridges with a portal gun, you'll be disappointed. Instead, you get forklifts hurtling through the air, often landing how and where you don't anticipate/expect. Getting one to its destination without losing passengers is nothing; getting a convey of ten or twelve there is an achievement. No bonus points are awarded if you apply construction best practices, but they help with the latter.

The game also has a level editor, which you can use to design, build, test and upload your own test chambers (including buttons, companion cubes, panels, pools of deadly fluid, portals, turrets and walls).

2. Defense of the Ancients (DoTA) 2 [Valve]

Valve's remake of the massive multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) that started life as a total conversion (TC) mod for Warcaft (no, not WoW, before that) has no puzzle elements, but definitely requires heaps of strategy (and time) if you want to play it well. Pick a character class/type (Healer/Support, Melee/Tank or Ranged) and join a team. Seek out and destroy the opposition's base, particularly the life-giving Ancient fountain. This is an incredibly challenging game, taking at least a month of a few to several hours of offline practice a day to "get good" to the level required to be ready for even a beginner match online (or you can be expected to be torn to shreds by other players). As much as I enjoy it (despite the toxicity of the community), I wouldn't recommend it if you're only looking for a "casual" gaming experience (something you can play for an hour or two every now and then).

3. Don't Starve (DS) [Klei Entertainment]

Don't Starve (AKA DS) is a charming and surprisingly addictive hand-drawn survival-horror game with a somewhat sinister soundtrack. The object of the game is to survive out in a hostile wilderness, gathering resources, building tools and a base, gradually improving both.

4. Don't Starve Together (DST) [Klei Entertainment]

Two-player split-screen cooperative mode for Don't Starve. As much fun as one can have playing DS by oneself, it's even more so when you've got a team mate to watch your back. Double the resource-gathering, double the cooking, double the improving base camp, definitely more than double the fun.

5. Fallout 1 & 2 [Black Isle/Interplay/Obsidian Entertainment]

You and a rag-tag bunch of people are the survivors of a nuclear holocaust that turned America into a wasteland, some time in the sixties. Having lived most of your life in an underground vault, you must trek across the wasteland, fighting all sorts of radiation-altered creatures, in order to find items your fellow-vault dwellers need in order to survive.

I'm not including Fallout 3, NV and 4 in this list, since those are more focused on FPS play (even though FO 4 has base-building) and, IMO, Bethesda made a hash of them, as it has so many of its later games. (When will we have Unity/Unreal Engine versions of Fallout 3+ and The Elder Scrolls 3+, without bugs and suck? I might tackle that as a project once I've learned Unity, but don't get your hopes up; I've still a long way to go.)

6. Fallout Shelter [Bethesda]

A simple, but oddly addictive little click-farmer based on the original Fallout games, this one focuses on life in the vaults, with some questing in the wastelands. Build, expand and improve your vault, without overtaxing your resources (caps, food, power, water, weapons and Nuka Cola).

In my opinion, this is the best Fallout game that Bethesda has made (even though they somehow managed to introduce a memory bottleneck/leak into Unity's managed code, which takes a massive helping of failsauce). In all honesty and sincerity, "it just works". No, really, it actually does, even with (most) mods.

7. Far Cry Primal

Forage, hunt, survive and learn skills as a member of an early hominid tribe. Full disclosure here: I have yet to play this, but I really want to; it looks gorgeous and a boatload of fun. If the first two titles in the _Far Cry_ series are anything to go by, then it will be.

8. Loop: A Tranquil Puzzle Game

Loop is presented as “a tranquil puzzle game”, which it is. Playing it is simple in concept, but challenging in practice: Shuffle tiles around a hexagon in order to arrange three different-coloured and intertwined loops correctly. Replay value is low, though.

9. Niche – A Genetics Survival Game

Take the core game-play mechanics that make Spore and The Sims 1-3 (but not 4) great and reduce on low heat for a few months. What you get is a simple, independently developed game about evolution. It's not as big-budget as Spore, but it's also not as ambitious. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since the fun of Spore stops after the tribal stage, in my experience.

Explore and master your environment, survive and evolve a species of cute catlike creatures.

10. Offworld Trading Company

Terraform a planet and set up a galactic trading empire. This particular description is short and vague because I haven't played it in a while. I don't remember much more than that I enjoyed playing it.

11. Portal 1 & 2 [Valve]

Solve physics puzzles with the use of buttons, automated/electric doors, elevated and inclined platforms, laser weapons and portals that teleport you and companion cubes to different parts of a level. Escape the test facility and the sardonic, unhelpful AI that is trying to kill you.

12. Sid Meyer's Civilization IV – VI [Firaxis/Take 2]

Conquer the world (through economic, religious or military dominance). Starting as a tribe of hunter-gatherers in prehistory, explore various technology trees and learn some history as you do your best to sustain and expand your civilization into modern times and beyond. If there's a charismatic leader that you can name, the chances that you can play as the corresponding civilization are high. Take your pick from Americans, Aztecs, Babylonians, Greeks, Huns, Japanese, Mongols, Russians, Zulus and more.

They're not cheap titles, but are definitely worth getting on sale.

13. Synonomy [Christopher Cinq and Mars Jarvis]

Starting with an initial word, traverse a cluster of synonyms in order to reach the target in as few moves as possible.

14. Terra Nil [Devolver Digital]

Screenshot from Terra Nil's Website

Not to be confused with Tera (a fantasy RPG, I think), this game is about conservation and ecology. Clean up and rehabilitate blighted land in order to transform it into a haven for wildlife. This is also a game I haven't played, but am really keen on.

15. World of Goo [2D Boy]

A charming little tower-builder with a mixture of computer-aided graphics and hand-drawn animation, featuring a great soundtrack. Build a tower to a suction pipe, to collect goo balls. The more goo collected, the better. This is worth buying for the soundtrack alone (not that the game is bad in any way); something that I find rare in a game.

Finally, something constructive you can do with gobs of snot ...

16. Zen of Sudoku

A tranquil sudoku game with a few difficulty levels. Allows you to enter guessed numbers before confirming. It can also provide help with missing numbers (once per game for each of block, column and row, if I remember correctly). I haven't played this in a while, either. Perhaps I should.

Other Games

Shelter 69 is not on this list because it's pretty much Fallout Shelter with ecchi and hentai content, but I need to keep it clean. Rust seems a bit like DS, from my initial impressions, having not played it. A number of other games on my wishlist aren't on this list, simply because I haven't looked at them in a while and don't stand out enough in my mind for me to have anything to write about them. If you feel that there's anything particularly spectacular that I've missed and that's worth a look, please let me know in the comments, since there's no doubt plenty of content about which I know little to nothing.

Thumbnail image: A screenshot of some of the games in my Steam library. Steam is copyright property of Valve.