Thanks to running a growing business, I have very little free time or spare energy in my day, which is an unfortunate situation for someone who loves to collect new hobbies and then stress out about which ones to prioritize. I go through jags of trying to rigorously schedule my time between 6 and 9am to cram in as many non-work tasks as possible, but that sometimes has the ironic effect of feeling extra stressful instead of relaxing. To counteract this, there’s a bunch of little games I like to play every day to make sure I have some chill-out time. But of course I’ve now collected too many, and they’ve become a stress in themselves.
A few years back, I replaced the time I’d have spent on The New York Times’ games with–sorry, I hate it too–LinkedIn’s slate of daily offerings, which are surprisingly good. At first, it was mainly word puzzle Crossclimb and the logic puzzles Queens and Tango. Queens is a star battle puzzle, which for a while got me playing star battles obsessively, but unfortunately/luckily the free website I went to for them got randomly enshittified, so I stopped.
But then LinkedIn started adding more games. Maze-like game Zip showed up in March 2025, and I liked it well enough to add it to my rotation. A year later Patches came out, and even though I sometimes get frustrated with it depending on how much coffee I’ve had before I start, I play it every day too. In early June LinkedIn added Wend, a word-finding game that I find compelling for the same draw-a-line reason as Zip and think-of-words reason as Crossclimb, even though there are sometimes multiple words that fit the game’s letter requirement that for some reason are just not the word the game wants, which can be frustrating. (I cannot believe I’m admitting to how much time I spend on LinkedIn, but let’s breeze past that, shall we?)
Then there’s the games outside of LinkedIn. After Gita wrote about Clues By Sam I started playing that every day. And despite my better judgement and morals, I’ve grown humiliatingly attached to my cursed Duolingo streak; every day I tell myself this is the time I put the hideous app away for good, but then my lizard brain craves its blips and pings, and then the basest part of my nature gets sucked into the leaderboards and I’m voluntarily watching ads for more energy to climb just a little higher in some stupid fucking league.
Thanks to those ads, and to the concussion I got in May, I’m now a daily visitor to Magic Sort, a mindless and utterly predatory mobile game that I saw in a Duolingo ad. It is full of leaderboards and mini-competitions and side goals that are baffling to me in both their requirements and their purpose, but a few nights ago on a whim I joined its “Sky Jump” sidequest where you earn in-game currency for passing levels on the first try. When I failed a level I started using my coins for a re-do, and even when I realized this is exactly what the game wanted me to do–enticing me to burn through my free money so I would give it actual money, which I must stress I did not–I kept going, until finally the price for a retry was steep enough that I came to my senses and hurled my phone to the other side of the couch. But I still at least play its daily puzzle every day, and sometimes get sucked into a run of the rest of its offerings.
So here’s the extent of my daily “just a little break for games” habit, which must be followed in this precise order or I feel like I’m wearing an itchy shirt: Crossclimb, Patches, Zip, Wend, Tango, and Queens, then a hop over to Clues By Sam, then to my phone for the daily Magic Sort puzzle, then to Duolingo for what is usually one lesson but sometimes becomes more depending how things are going on the league leaderboards which I must remind you that I do not care about except obviously I care about them a lot. Laid out like this, it’s clearly a much bigger chunk of my morning than I ever intended it to be, and clearly runs counter to the purpose of the games being a little treat between tasks.
The problem is that there are always new little games. Last night I saw people talking about a new word game by Hank Green called Smush, which is a game about using letters to find words. The letters can only be used a certain number of times, which inspires a lot of strategic thinking. I gave it a quick try last night and then went to bed, but this morning I found myself poking through its archives, lured by the siren song of high scores. It's a clever little game and you should totally check it out if you like that kind of thing, but part of me is hoping I forget about it soon so that I don’t add it to my rotation. (No offense, game! It’s me, not you!)
I feel like I cannot live like this, that I have way more to do with my precious pre-work time than play a bunch of games that run the gamut from “fun and charming” to “playing this is making me a worse person.” But at the same time, they are a nice antidote to the crushing pressures of schedule optimization and limited free time that makes me crave them in the first place. I’m probably not the only person who feels like my life could be more fulfilling if I could just achieve the kind of self-mastery that lets me get done everything I both need to do and want to do in a day, only to have moments when I zoom out and look at the structures around me and think, no, it’s the system itself that’s causing this, the demands of life and work and capitalism that want to convince me that I’m the problem when really it’s that so many facets of life are just so frequently impossibly hard.
That’s a big crisis to have about a bunch of free games, and maybe you are just a normal person who takes normal little breaks and is not as obsessed as me with all the things you want to do with your one and only life. If that is you, please tell me your secret, because this morning I’ve been thinking “well maybe if I start getting up at 5 instead of 6…” and, despite what the hustle culture bros of LinkedIn say, that is simply no way to live.
