Recommendations

Board Games Link to heading

  • Civilisation - Guide a civilisation from ancient times to the modern era through exploration, culture, science and conflict. Slow and tactical, expect to set aside most of a day for a competitive game with friends

  • Scythe - A dieselpunk strategy game set in an alternate 1920s Europe. Combines resource management, area control, and engine building with stunning artwork and a unique world, plus who doesn’t like throwing mechs at each other?

  • Terraforming Mars - Compete with other corporations to make Mars habitable by raising temperature, oxygen, and ocean levels. A deeply satisfying engine builder that rewards long term planning and gets better with every play

Books Link to heading

  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - A lone astronaut wakes up with no memory light-years from Earth and has to piece together why he’s there. A love letter to science and problem-solving disguised as a thriller

  • The Martian by Andy Weir - An astronaut is stranded alone on Mars and has to science his way to survival. Inventive, funny, and as accurate as possible to real physics and chemistry

  • The Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor - A software engineer has his brain cryogenically frozen and wakes up as an AI controlling a Von Neumann probe tasked with exploring the galaxy. A brilliant series that gets progressively more ambitious in scope

  • The Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Follows the evolution of a civilisation of uplifted spiders and the last remnants of their human creators. Amazingly unique in its ideas and shows just how alien technology and society could be

Video games Link to heading

Co-op Link to heading

  • Deep Rock Galactic - A cooperative first-person shooter where teams of space dwarves mine procedurally generated caves while fighting off hordes of alien insects. Doesn’t take itself too seriously while leaning into comedic corporate satire

  • HELLDIVERS 2 - A co-op third-person shooter where squads of soldiers fight for a satirical authoritarian democracy against waves of alien threats. Offers a variety of difficulties that do a great job at giving you a challenge regardless of your skill level. Chaotic, funny, and best played with friends who don’t mind friendly fire

  • PAYDAY 2 - A co-op heist shooter where teams plan and execute increasingly elaborate robberies. Go from silently stealing jewlery between guard patrols to waging outright war while stealing classified intelligence from a private army. Endlessly replayable with a huge variety of missions, weapons, and build options, though expect a considerable cost to purchase all of the DLC

  • Sea of Thieves - A shared world pirate adventure best experienced with friends. Equal parts relaxing PVE and chaotic PVP. Experience all of the classic pirate activities from digging up buried treasure to fighting the kraken to exchanging cannon fire with other players

First Person Shooters Link to heading

  • Team Fortress 2 - Valve’s beloved, genre-defining class-based shooter that has been running since 2007 and still has a thriving community. Endlessly playable and one of the most mechanically distinct shooters ever made

  • The Finals - A free-to-play team-based shooter set in a hyper-destructible game show arena that stands out from the genre by making the environment itself a weapon, with buildings that can be reshaped or outright demolished mid-match. Fast-paced and a breath of fresh air in an over-saturated genre

  • Titanfall 2 - A first-person shooter with incredibly fluid movement mechanics that makes every other FPS feel sluggish in comparison. Work in tandem with a giant mech which drastically changes how you interact with other players and the environment. Criminally undersold on release, now widely recognised as one of the best shooters ever made with a dedicated and passionate fanbase. The single-player campaign is also incredibly worth the time with incredible level design that works wonderfully with the movement mechanics

Roguelites Link to heading

  • Dead Cells - A brutally satisfying roguelite action platformer where every run feels different. Fast, fluid combat with a huge variety of weapons and builds to discover. There are a wide-variety of environments each hosting their own unique enemies allowing for incredible diversity in your route through the game. Unlocking harder difficulties provides different routes and causes enemies to appear outside of their original environements, rewarding players who manage to master the game with a bigger challenge and more options

  • Dome Keeper - A roguelite where you alternate between defending your dome from waves of aliens and mining beneath it for resources and upgrades. A simple concept executed brilliantly

  • Haste - A high-speed third-person roguelite where you race through procedurally generated worlds as the universe collapses around you. All about mastering momentum and perfect landings to literally outrun the end of the world

  • Ring of Pain - A card-based dungeon crawler where encounters are arranged in a ring around your character, forcing careful decisions regarding your positioning, timing, and choice in action. Tense, atmospheric, and weird in the best of ways

  • Risk of Rain 2 - A third-person 3d roguelite shooter where you crash-land on an alien planet and must survive escalating waves of increasingly dangerous enemies while stacking unique items into absurd combinations. A wide-variety of procedurally generated environments and hundreds of unlockable items, characters, and abilities provides incredible replayability

  • SNKRX - A minimalist auto-battler roguelite where you build a snake of heroes that loops around the arena automatically fighting enemies. Combines RPG mechanics with the classic game of Snake. Deceptively deep synergy system hidden inside a very simple concept

  • Stackflow - A roguelite Tetris-like where you fit blocks together to trigger combos and hit score targets heavily inspired by Balatro. Simple to pick up but with a surprising amount of strategic depth emerging from the piece synergies

Space Link to heading

  • Citizen Sleeper 2 Starward Vector - A narrative RPG set in the asteroid belt of a colonised star system in the aftermath of a corporate war where you play as an escaped synthetic worker trying to survive. Beautifully written, slow-paced, and gently emotional

  • Dyson Sphere Program - A factory-building game set across an entire star system, with the ultimate goal of constructing a dysan sphere around a star to harvest its energy while defending yourself from autonomous threats. Enormously satisfying in scale and hits the niche of a clean, sci-fi factory builder

  • Elite: Dangerous - A 1:1 scale recreation of the Milky Way to explore at your own pace with other players. Trade, fight, mine, or just explore real star systems. A steep learning curve, but the best way to experience life in a space-faring age

  • FTL Faster Than Light - A brutally difficult roguelite spaceship management game where you crew and upgrade a ship fleeing across a hostile galaxy. Tense, replayable, and one of the most influential indie games ever made

  • Prosperous Universe - A browser-based space economy MMO where every resource must be produced and traded by real players. Build and manage a business with long waiting times and fully customisable, text-based interface

  • PULSAR Lost Colony - A first-person co-op spaceship simulation where each player operates as different role throughout the ship; engineering, weapons specialist, science officer, pilot, and captain. One of the most immersive crew experiences in gaming

  • Star Trucker - A space trucking simulator set in a retro-futuristic solar system. Haul cargo, manage your cab, and deal with the mundane realities of life as an interstellar haulier. Wonderfully relaxing and characterful

  • Surviving Mars - A city-builder focused on establishing and sustaining a colony on Mars. Balancing resource management, dome construction, and the very real threat of your colonists dying in creative ways is vital for success

  • Stellaris - A grand strategy space 4X where you guide a civilisation from its first steps into space to galactic dominance. Enormous in scope, endlessly replayable, and with some of the most creative alien encounter writing in gaming

Strategy and Management Link to heading

  • Teamfight Tactics - Riot Games’ free-to-play auto battler where eight players draft teams of League of Legends champions and watch them fight it out. Deceptively deep strategy game that refreshes its content every few months with entirely new character combinations, activatable traits, and set-defining mechanics

  • The Farmer Was Replaced - A programming puzzle game where you write Python-like code to automate a farm. Surprisingly deep introduction to programming concepts disguised as a laid-back farming game

  • Umamusume Pretty Derby - A Japanese mobile game which saw a global release in 2025 where legendary racehorses are reincarnated as anime girls who you train to compete. Far more engaging as a management sim than the premise suggests with suprisingly complex mechanics hidden under the hood

YouTube Channels Link to heading

Gaming Link to heading

  • Code Bullet - Australian developer who uses machine learning and AI to tackle games and challenges, then documents the chaotic results with great comedic energy

  • Kilian Experience - Deeply surreal gaming commentary channel where the joke is almost never what you expect. They are best experienced without knowing too much going in

  • martincitopants - Gaming YouTuber with chaotic, heavily edited long-form videos across strategy and sandbox games; particularly My Summer Car and Kerbal Space Program

  • Olexa - Gaming channel specialising in obscure indie games, roguelites, and puzzle games. A great source for finding games you’d never have discovered otherwise

  • Quantum - League of Legends streamer and YouTuber who mostly plays mid-lane mages. Offers soft, chill vibes

  • Salty Phish - Hero shooter creator with a great competitive TF2 series playing in the Highlander format

  • SolarLight - Welsh TF2 YouTuber widely considered one of the greatest Demoknight players of all time. Great technical analyses and gameplay videos for fans of Team Fortress 2

  • TheStellarJay - Video essay channel focused on games. Thoughtful, unhurried analysis of game design and what makes games work or fail

Science and Philosophy Link to heading

  • Exurb1a - Philosophical science fiction channel blending physics, consciousness, and the far future with dry British humour. Equal parts genuinely thought-provoking and deeply melancholic

  • Exurb2a - The secondary channel of Exurb1a with miscellaneous music, experiments, and oddities that don’t fit the main channel

  • Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - Beautifully animated explainer videos covering science, philosophy, and existential topics with what they call “optimistic nihilism” with consistently stunning production

  • Rational Animations - Animated essays on rationalism, altruism, and how to think more clearly. Thought-provoking and well-argued even if you don’t agree with every conclusion

  • Sciencephile the AI - Science channel covering physics, cosmology, and the nature of reality with a tts narrator that covers some genuinely deep topics accessibly (notably not actually an AI)

Other Light Education Link to heading

  • BlueJay - Animated history channel covering everything from the Victorian Era to the Cold War with humour and charm

  • CGP Grey - Meticulously researched video essays on politics, geography, and how the world works, with clean visuals and a gift for making complex systems feel simple

  • Nightshift – Kurzgesagt After Dark - The new, more experimental sibling channel to Kurzgesagt that covers heavier and more philosophical topics that don’t quite fit the main channel’s tone

  • Oversimplified - Animated history channel that condenses major historical events and wars into short, comedic videos without sacrificing the actual substance

  • Sam O’Nella Academy - Crude stick-figure animated channel covering bizarre historical facts and obscure topics. Not very active sadly, but the back catalogue is worth watching

  • TierZoo - Treats real-world animals as if they were characters in a videogame which makes nature accessible and uses language familiar to gamers

Science Communication Link to heading

  • Dr. Becky - British astrophysicist and Oxford researcher who makes astronomy and space science accessible

  • Kyle Hill - Science communicator who specialises in the physics and engineering behind pop culture, nuclear history, and real-world disasters

  • PBS Space Time - A more technically rigorous science communication channel with graduate-level astrophysics and cosmology content and reviews of research papers

  • Vsauce - The classic deep-dive curiosity channel. Michael Stevens takes seemingly simple questions and spirals them into explorations of physics, philosophy, and human perception