I just discovered a remarkably engrossing little game by the name of Slipways. It's less than $20 on Steam and I've so far gotten 7 hours or so out of it, so it passes my (admittedly low) bar for 'worth it?'It's... a 3X-adjacent empire builder, sort of? In spaaaace? :D You are dropped in a randomly-generated sector and your goal is to build an empire based around matching planets. A planet has a given set of inputs it needs and will produce a set of outputs: give planet Woomba some People and it produces Minerals, Tetragon wants Food and Minerals to produce People, and Zeta Reticuli will happily generate Food if you supply it with Biomass and Water, and... so on and so forth.
Planets are connected by slipways, which are basically wormholes from point A to point B, and (at least initially) are of limited length and cannot cross each other, so it rapidly becomes sort of a puzzle game in conjunction with the exploration/exploitation/expansion options.
A given 'run' is strictly limited by length; the tech tree (which can drastically change your available options) is influenced by the choices you make re: what populates that sector and the random events you uncover whilst exploring; and you can be thrown out of office (ending the run) if you don't keep enough of your planets happy. In the end the points don't matter because nothing appears to be skill-threshold-locked, but if you get a dopamine hit out of beating your previous record, it's got that covered, too.
And that's... pretty much it! It's pretty, it's pretty simple, and it's simply fun. Low-key scratches an itch I didn't know I needed scratched.
--sofaspud
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