Dear Mother, what should I play while the baby sleeps?

Dear Mother,

First-time dad here with very limited and sporadic pockets of game time looking for something that’s easy to pick up when I put my daughter down for a nap.

Basically, I am tired of numbing my brain on click-to-addict free-to-play games on my phone. There has to be something better! Sometimes I have 4 minutes while the bottle is warming in the middle of the night. Or maybe 15 minutes while I walk the dog and stroller the baby in the morning. Sometimes when she is having a hard time staying asleep it’s just me and her in a dark room for 45 minutes together, but with me singing the same three lullabies or giving her back her pacifier.

I am desperate for something that’s easy to jump back into in a moments notice, but also just as easy to put down as soon as she wakes up. I’m a turn-based lover so that seems to be the easiest I’ve found so far, instead of trying to pause a live game or, worse, abandon a multiplayer game. I’ve played lots of roguelike deck builders and enjoyed most of them — Balatro, Slay the Spire, Griftlands, Monster Train, etc. — and those seem like they would fit best, not sure.

Help!

First time dad, long time gamer

Dear First-time dad,

Thank you for asking this question. My sister is expecting her first this summer, and I often find myself daydreaming about waking my well-rested self up at midnight to be with her baby so my sister can sleep. (How often will I actually be able to do this? Who knows. How often should I do it? Maybe you can give me some advice there.) In this daydream, I picture myself playing a video game, of course, while baby naps and my sister and her husband snore peacefully through the whole thing. Childless aunt to the rescue.

I do think you're smart to try to find some games besides those free-to-play ones you describe. While there are some good free games on phones, the ones you describe as "click-to-addict" are just that: cheaply designed to get you invested within the first few hours before infiltrating the gameplay with long ads and annoying paywalls. Not only do these games irk both of us, it seems, but they also aren't a very restorative use of your time. If you've got four minutes while the bottle's warming, don't spend 90 seconds of that watching a weirdly sexist ad for an online gambling game, you know? We're on the same page here.