Today's SideDeal4-Pack: Exploding Kittens Grab & Game Bundle
Our Take
- Good, easy games for the whole family
- Unless someone in the family has a salmon allergy
- (To be clear, the salmon in Happy Salmon isn’t real; we’re just saying it could be traumatic)
- Are they Mac-compatible: No, and that’s the whole point! Look away from the screens!
Ease Up
Here in the first full week of 2026, allow me a little bit of sincerity as I attempt to take what is obviously just a pep talk for myself and turn it into some product copy about a bundle of games.
New Year’s resolutions are arbitrary and, on some level, a little silly. Nobody will force you to assess your choices and make changes on January 1st, just like nobody’s going to stop you from doing the same on April 27th.
Still, I always enjoy setting some resolutions, and most of them have to do with prioritizing my health. And I mean that broadly. My physical health, my mental health, all of it.
The problem is that we–and again, this is a personal pep talk so really I mean I–tend to think about health as existing only in its most extreme, and therefore unappealing, form.
‘Eating healthy’ comes to mean salads for two meals a day and making green smoothies for breakfast, rather than, say, eating a granola bar instead of getting a cheese danish at the coffee shop. ‘Exercising’ means joining a gym or doing Couch to 5k, not taking a walk and listening to a podcast during a break at work. And cutting down on screen time and tech-reliance means reading difficult books and doing DIY projects around your house, rather than… well… literally just putting your phone away.
To be clear, I like all of these things in moderation. There’s nothing wrong with a salad or a green smoothie. A bit of intense physical exertion can do wonders. And learning new stuff and completing a big project? You’ll feel so satisfied when you finish!
But the key to keeping on top of your resolutions throughout the whole year requires actually finding the thing in the second category–like the granola bar, the leisurely walk–that help you achieve them without feeling like a major feat.
Which brings me to these games.
If you put your phone away and play some stupid card games with your friends or family at night, will it get your brain working as hard as a work of great literature? Or will it give you the same sense of pride as a newly painted room or a freshly built shelf? No. But it’s also a lot easier and will still help you achieve the goal of getting off your phone for a while.
Which is important, because again, you just don’t wake up every day ready to tackle something huge.
In conclusion: fun is good, and doing things the easy way is rad.
