Parents' Guide to Stellaris

This massive space-strategy game can easily keep you playing for hours, as long as you're willing to put in time to learn its secrets and deal with frustrating random moments. Stellaris takes the large scale of 4X games (which require you to think multiple steps ahead to be successful) and expands it significantly. Sure, there's exploring new star systems, establishing your empire, and keeping your citizens on your home world and colonized (or terraformed) planets happy and productive. You'll also have to fulfill political mandates from elected leaders and determine how peaceful or aggressive you'll be toward other cultures. Stellaris reinvigorates the genre with random events based on the mystery of space. Whether it's discovering extinct alien cultures, rogue science cults within your own empire, or advanced robot uprisings that threaten to destroy all organic life in the universe, many events can crop up at any time, which require your attention and change the direction of your game immeasurably. You'll be surprised by how many times you'll tell yourself you're just going to play for one or two more minutes, just to see what the next random moment will be. Couple this with the ability to tailor almost every aspect of play, from the universe size to the number of species you encounter, and you'll be guaranteed that no two games will ever play the same way. It's notable that the console version of the game works just as well as the PC version of the game, and has just as much content as one of the later PC updates, making it perfect for console strategy fans looking for a challenge.

While the random elements definitely reduce boredom, it's also a double-edged sword, because you can get completely overwhelmed by events out of your control. You can start a game and find yourself almost immediately surrounded by rival civilizations, each of which is potentially larger and more advanced than you. Or perhaps you're extremely resource-strapped, making your expansion moves incredibly difficult to accomplish. You can even have so many negative random events happen that your species is doomed shortly after it begins. That's frustrating and will force you to restart the game repeatedly to find a decent starting position. Similarly, the tutorial is rather sparse, so even if you're trying to get instructions from the game, you'll need to put in dozens of hours before you'll really understand how some of the resources you have or develop seem incredibly abundant one minute, and vastly depleted the next. It's confusing and requires some dedication (and multiple playthroughs) to start figuring everything out. But these issues aside, Stellaris has immense, deep play for strategy fans that will keep them reaching for the stars and new solar systems for hundreds of hours.