Gaming for busy people

I enjoy playing games, both video games and board games a lot. One of my many joys in life is to spend an entire day either diving deep into a long story of a video game or get together with friends to move tokens around boards on a table while having a great time.

As an adult in modern life, these full gaming days are few and far between so my gaming has shifted a lot lately to play more games that can be enjoyed in shorter sessions while still enjoying them equal amounts.

A big shift for me started with Nintendo Switch and later continued with Steam Deck as both of them are mobile and crucially, they both provided a sleep mode where you could suspend the device mid-game without having to save and exit. That combination meant I can pick up a device, immediately jump into the game, play a 10 minute session during a break and then put it back to sleep and continue my day.

For both devices, I have a dock in my living room connected to my projector and full AV setup but I also have secondary docks at my desk connected to my display and in the case of Steam Deck, my keyboard and mouse.

Once I started getting into this mindset, I ended up buying and playing more games that didn't require me to remember where I was the last time I left off. Heavier story-based or base-building games also take a while to immerse myself into the world so they are not great for short sessions.

Natural genre for this kind of gaming is roguelikes and roguelites. You start each run from scratch and in many games the individual runs are short, anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. Other great genre that is perfect for short sessions is sports games where individual games usually last less than half an hour.

Short-session game recommendations

I recently returned to Lonely Mountains to do mountain biking and downhill skiing. Each run is only a couple of minutes long so it's really easy to adjust based on how much time you have to play. In Lonely Mountains: Downhill, you're descending mountain trails with your bike, finding new routes, enjoying nature and trying to beat your previous personal bests. In the sequel Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders you switch the bike to skiis and enjoy the snowy mountains.

Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike where your goal is to use your cards to beat monsters in three, increasingly difficult act and gather new cards and relics to improve your deck. A single, completed run lasts around an hour but most of the runs don't finish successfully so in reality a single run is way less than that.

Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game where you are controlling mechs in an 8 by 8 grid, trying to defend the world from alien attacks. You control three to five war machines and alternate taking turns with the opponent. Each run has five different areas, each split to smaller sections for individual fights with individual goals. After each area, you get to improve your mechs based on how well you performed.

The 2025 hit game Blue Prince operates on day cycle where the mansion resets each night. Every time you walk through an unopened door, you get to draft a new room from a small selection of randomly selected rooms and your goal is to figure out the mysteries the mansion hides.

PokéRogue is a fan-game set in the Pokémon universe that focuses solely on battling. Each run, you select a starting party and go through a battle after battle against wild Pokémon and fellow trainers. You catch new Pokémon, level up and evolve your party members and purchase items from the shop to keep your party going.

Shogun Showdown is a turn-based, puzzle-esque roguelike fighting game. You are a samurai equipped with a few starting weapons and you battle opponents in small, tight 2D-space moving left and right and queueing attacks you unleash to your opponents. It's a really neat game: the mechanics are simple but have enough depth to be interesting. Compared to many other games on the list, there's less variation between individual runs, especially in the early sections but it's still a fun game that I haven't ran out of replay value yet.