Hey everyone, Andrew here with an update on some of the video games I’ve been enjoying lately.

I spend a lot of my gaming time with Destiny 2. It’s a first-person game set in the far future. The last bits of humanity are fighting against a variety of alien and robot armies. A mysterious giant sphere (the Traveler) lands on the Last City on Earth and resurrects you, the player (referred to as the Guardian), and imbues you with a variety of space magic. You use your space magic powers in combination with a variety of cool and futuristic weapons to complete a variety of tasks to save humanity and defeat the aliens and robots.

Destiny 2 has a 6-player activity called raids that I really enjoy. You and 5 friends work together across a handful of “encounters” to progress towards defeating a particularly powerful enemy. Each encounter has different mechanics and they’re both fun to learn when they first come out and perfect with friends over time. One of my favorite part about raids is that every person has some kind of job in each encounter so you really have to work together as a team to accomplish your goals.

There are also a number of more standard video game modes in Destiny 2 where you can play against other people or single player campaigns. These are also a ton of fun! A new mode is coming out in a few weeks where you have to

Destiny is wrapping up a 10 year run following the same main story this summer. The final expansion was a bit delayed so there hasn’t been as much new stuff to do as usual lately. That’s lead me to try out a new game called Balatro.

Balatro (latin for “joker”) is a deck-building game focused on expanding traditional poker.

The basic rules of the game work as you’d expect. You’re dealt a hand of cards and you have to play the best hand that you can after a couple of discards. As you play hands you’re able to purchase jokers that modify your played hands in a variety of ways. Some jokers can increase your scoring for a given hand and other jokers can make it easy to play certain hands. A few examples are:

• Joker that lets you play a flush with only 4 cards of the same suit

• Joker that gives you 2x the chips for playing a pair

There are 150 jokers in the game so there are a ton of interesting combinations. Your goal is to complete 8 antes of 3 rounds each. The 3rd round of each ante has a “boss” that adds an extra challenge. Some bosses may disable a particular suit of cards or others may deal you cards face down.

I’ve been having a ton of fun with both Destiny and Balatro here as winter starts to transition to spring. It’s fun to look forward to these games when it’s cold or snowy outside!