I dug up my old 3DS in the past weeks, installed some custom firmware to play my backups of DS/3DS/GBA games. A bit of Zelda Minish Cap, some Metroid Fusion… But mostly I find myself playing various Pokemon ROM hacks lol.
I’ve been getting into “Pokemon Elite Redux”, which is a difficulty/challenge game centered around each Pokemon having up to 4 abilities at the same time in battle. And there’s tons of new abilities that make each pokemon uniquely useful. It’s certainly challenging, even on the lowest difficulty. It’s happened to me several times that I have to get together a whole new team to beat a single trainer. But, there’s zero grinding involved, and there’s SO many quality-of-life changes that it’s super easy to get a whole new team squared up in just a few minutes. That makes it really easy to jump in for a few minutes when I can, without feeling like I’m wasting my time
I’ve been getting into Doppelkopf! It’s a trick-taking game with tons of rules and variations on those rules and a kinda weird ordering for the trump cards, but it’s quite fun. My favorite thing opposed to other trick-taking games is that you start each round but don’t necessarily know who of the other 3 players is on your team. So each round can end up requiring a different strategy!
It’s pretty complex, but my gf’s mom has been teaching the two of us and her sister, so it’s a bit less overwhelming. Tons of people in my department play at university, so I’ll finally be able to drop in and play a few rounds with them as study breaks :D