Each week on a Friday, RPS news priestess Alice O descends from her mountaintop fortress-monastery to pose the rest of us a single question: What are we all playing this weekend?. A simple ask, you might think. A nice way of sharing what we’re enjoying with each other and our readers. Not to me. In recent months, I’ve come to dread this question, as it’s always the prompt for a bout of frantic stress. “Oh crikey,” I’ll say, all breezy and optimistic. “I’ve heard good things about Dukes of Manglebum – might give that a go. Or maybe the new Bungletech expansion, since they’ve finally fixed the bungling mechanic”.
Yeah, right. Sure I will. I might as well be Gollum, claiming his favourite item of jewellery is “a watch”. Because I know, just like everyone else knows, that when the working day is over, I’ll caper back to my dingy games hole and continue to croon over the Precious. Or rather, the Preciouses. Because despite my every effort to snap out of it, I’ve been stuck for months playing the same two games over and over again: Age Of Empires 2, and to a lesser extent, Hearthstone.