Osmos is a game about being a blob in a void full of other blobs. Absorb something smaller and you grow; touch something larger and it eats you. You move by ejecting part of yourself in the opposite direction, which means every course correction makes you smaller. It is a beautiful game built on one rule of physics.

My friend Ryan Miller sent me an Excel spreadsheet with a game he’d invented called Territories. It had the satisfying quality of a good pencil-and-paper game: the rules fit in a sentence, but the strategy is unclear. It feels like a simplified Go.