Ask HN: What video games do you play during the day?

I like playing tetris and subway surfers to pass the time

I had a friend that used to take mid-day breaks to play CS:GO.

The weird part is that it seemed to work wonders, I guess there's something about getting shot at that really gets your energy levels going

For something really quick and just in the browser I jump into a round on https://krunker.io/

I like to play something that makes me feel like I did something, so I lean on games like Halo where I can play a match. My favorite games are role playing games, but I reserve those for vacations and breaks because I don't feel like I can get anything meaningfully done in about 10 minutes.

Give Rimworld a try. It's easy to get a few things done every break and pausing fits in naturally. You can even almost get away with backgrounding it where you set up a bunch of stuff to be done, and let the pawns do their own thing.

I use the chess.com app and solve puzzles. Lichess has free puzzles but I think the ones on chess.com are better.

Hearthstone has been my goto for "I want to play something for 15 minutes with little commitment" for the past 8 years now.

Elastomania. You can spend an arbitrarily small amount of time on it, like a 1 or 2 minutes. It also turns off the brain well.

Factorio, for 5 minutes? HahahHAHAHAmuhabahHaAha

I’m envious of your discipline ;-)

I have mame installed and the roms for some SNK games. I have a few saved states (boss battles) and I usually just play those and quit.

Splatoon matches are between 3 abs 5 mins.

Skater XL on a Steam Deck

Chess. Any time I have a couple minutes I manage to squeeze in a blitz game.

I played some Warband: Mount & Blade recently. I think many tasks in this game can be done in-between real-life stuff.

But last weekend I also bought Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos on GOG. And I think if you can control yourself, you can also play short times in-between real-life tasks.

The pixel art looks really good and I like how Westwood added specific graphics and animations to support parts of the story. The music adds a nice atmosphere and voice acting is pretty good to great (Patrick Stewart does part of the voice acting).

A review here: https://retrofreakreviews.com/2020/06/12/lands-of-lore-the-t...

Deep Rock Galactic!

League of Legends / Team fight Tactics.

Love that you can do a short game for 20 min and then quit or do more. Perfect to clear your head.

Mindustry. It's like Factorio + tower defense. There is a basic campaign and sandbox mode with multiplayer as well. It has in-game visual programming (logic) with which you can do crazy things like play Chess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoeS3S9S9Dk, and it also has a JavaScript API for mods.

I tend to avoid video games until I'm on proper vacation time. For diversion between programming boring stuff I tend to do some graphic design stuff or occasionally I'll go on StackOverflow and answer some Perl/JavaScript questions.

During vacation time I'll typically play one of the Fire Emblems or Halo (3, Reach or Infinite).

Last vacation I quite enjoyed Dirt Rally, nothing quite like nailing a stage at speed in Lancia 037. I don't care for driving games usually but these games are fun even just on a gamepad.

Elden Ring!

probably not what you are looking for, but here goes. Usually one of these: xpat2, xgammon, rogue or nethack

Master Duel,

Minecraft Creative

More often these days I just go lie down for 20 minutes since im right at home.

Rocket League. 5 minute matches.

If you have VR, beat sabre.

Sometimes I'll take a stab at Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or play a few rounds rounds of NES Tetris.

Weather permitting I'll prefer going outside.