Some say that fear is the mind-killer, but these people have never experienced boredom. We’re not talking about the blissful time when you decide to do nothing and enjoy it.
It’s about the times when you want to do something, but nothing seems cool. A dreadful slog making minutes of your free time feel like hours as you try to find something exciting to tide you over to the next batch of duties or a more acceptable time to go to sleep.
When boredom strikes, finding a good video game can be a great shield. Only video games offer “having something to do”, “having something to watch”, and “having something to think about” mixed in different proportions so that you can get the concoctions matching the mental state that boredom induces in you.
To help you along this path, we’ve compiled a list of long-lasting games which can be used as an improvised weapon against boredom at any time. We mostly focused on titles which work well both in short bursts and longer sessions, so you won’t find slow-burn games, or finite, linear experiences. All the games on the list are long-lasting and offer impressive replayability.
| Game | Release | Genre | Developer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Balatro | 2024-02-20 | Card Battler, Roguelike | LocalThunk |
 | Dorfromantik | 2021-03-25 | Puzzle, City Builder | Toukana Interactive |
 | Cult of the Lamb | 2022-08-11 | Action, Roguelike | Massive Monster |
 | Slay the Spire | 2019-01-23 | Indie | Mega Crit Games |
 | Sid Meier's Civilization VII | 2025-02-11 | Strategy, 4X | Firaxis Games |
 | Sid Meier's Civilization VI | 2016-10-20 | Economy | Aspyr (Mac, Linux) |
 | Hotline Miami 2 Wrong Number Digital Special Edition | 2015-03-10 | Adventure | Dennaton Games |
 | Hotline Miami | 2012-10-23 | Adventure | Dennaton Games |
 | Enter The Gungeon | 2016-04-05 | Adventure | Dodge Roll |
 | Papers Please | 2013-08-08 | Adventure | 3909 |
 | Celeste | 2018-01-25 | Adventure | Matt Makes Games Inc. |
 | Control Ultimate Edition | 2019-08-27 | Action | Remedy Entertainment |
 | Cuphead | 2017-09-29 | Indie | StudioMDHR Entertainment Inc. |
 | Doom Eternal | 2020-03-20 | Action | id Software |
 | Ftl Faster Than Light | 2012-09-14 | Adventure | Subset Games |
 | Minecraft Java Edition Minecraft Key Global | 2013-11-19 | Action | Mojang Studios |
 | Deep Rock Galactic | 2018-02-28 | First-Person | Ghost Ship Games |
 | Grand Theft Auto V | 2015-04-14 | Adventure | Rockstar North |
 | Rimworld | 2016-07-15 | Indie | Ludeon Studios |
 | The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim Special Edition | 2016-10-27 | Adventure | Bethesda Game Studios |
 | Vampire Survivors | 2021-12-17 | Poncle | |
 | Mortal Kombat 1 | 2023-09-19 | Fighting | NetherRealm Studios |
Balatro
| Release date: | 2024-02-20 |
| Genre: | Indie game |
| Developer: | LocalThunk |
Balatro was undisputably one of the best, most engaging games of 2024, and it owes that status to a clever mix of two highly engaging things: roguelike mechanics and card games.
It’s based on poker, with all the pairs, flushes, and straights, but it also adds point multipliers, rule modifiers, and the joy of discovering new cards you can throw into your deck for a chance at a good run.
It might sound a little bit drab on paper, but the gameplay design make the game truly shine, with a compelling gameplay loop, high importance of skill, and tons of possible winning strategies. The runs are relatively short, and since it’s a roguelike, it’s pretty much infinitely replayable. It’s probably the most engaging math has ever been in a video game, and once you get hooked, you’ll keep coming back.
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Civilization (any)
| Release date: | 2025-02-06 |
| Genre: | Strategy game |
| Developer: | Firaxis Games |
The Civilization series has been the most popular cause of the “just one more turn” syndrome for over thirty years.
Every installment threatens to make your sleep schedule very negotiable in the best way, but since it’s turn-based and a lot can happen during every round, it’s just as good as a game you fire up for an hour or two, get something done, deal with the actions of other Civs, and sing off again.
The premise is simple: you are an immortal, and anachronistic, ruler of a culture drawn from the history of the world, and your job is to guide it, turn-by-turn, from antiquity into the space-capable modernity. This involves choosing technologies for research, expanding your influence one hex at the time, and planning for the win-condition you’re interested in seeing. It’s a series perfect in any dose.
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Dorfromantik
| Release date: | 2021-03-25 |
| Genre: | Indie game |
| Developer: | Toukana Interactive |
This might well be the game with the smallest stakes on the list, but despite that Dorfromantik is a great way to pass the time. At its most basic, it’s about putting hexagonal tiles on an empty board.
The tiles have landscapes on them: rivers and train tracks, forests and fields, towns and plains. You can connect them like you would dominos, and the more sides match, the more points you get.
Occasionally, you get a quest: make an area with at least (or exactly) 60 houses, or 200 trees. Complete these quests, and you’ll get extra tiles for your slowly diminishing stack. So you can make a bigger map. The results look lovely even if you don’t bother with matching sides (except where you have to, like with rivers and railroads), but a good run can create a massive, complex, and gorgeous landscapes.
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Cult of the Lamb
| Release date: | 2022-08-11 |
| Genre: | Indie game |
| Developer: | Massive Monster |
Cult of the Lamb was 2022’s silent hit, which kept getting better as you peeled the — already appealing! — surface layers to get at the themes and gameplay underneath.
The cutesy, cartoonish game turned out to be closer to Happy Tree Friends than My Little Pony, and the roguelike action supported robust base building for your growing cult of cosmic horror-worshipping, anthropomorphic animals.
Like probably all roguelikes, Cult of the Lamb has a gameplay loop that’s satisfying in any amount, and the slightly grotesque of cutesy aesthetics, horror undertones, casual violence (sacrifices won’t make themselves, you know), and a good sense of humor makes it extremely entertaining. Be the most effective cult leader in the region by applying both word and sword.
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Slay the Spire
| Release date: | 2019-01-23 |
| Genre: | Indie |
| Developer: | Mega Crit Games |
There is some magic to card games that makes them a perfect solution for a spot of boredom, and Slay the Spire in undoubtedly one of the best card games out there.
It also happens to be a really good, straightforward, no-nonsense roguelike, which makes it all the better at making you engaged and excited. You simply choose your character, learn their deck, and try to get to the top of the Spire!
On your way to the top you’ll find numerous rooms put along several, occasionally intersecting, tracks. These rooms might include monsters, throwing you into turn- and card-based battles with very clear rules, but they might also be places of respite or restock. Each of the four characters has a meaningfully different playstyle, and learning the ins and outs of their decks is quite satisfying.
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FTL: Faster Than Light
| Release date: | 2012-09-14 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Subset Games |
FTL: Faster Than Light is an extremely compelling game you could spend any amount of time with, at any moment, and drop it as fast as you can pick it up.
It’s a powerful mix, and an excellent first choice if you are feeling a bit bored and want to get the brain juices flowing, because not only is it far from easy, but also each playthrough is different and presents different possibilities.
In FTL you’re a captain of a spaceship carrying a crucial message across the galaxy. You’re in charge of assigning crew to workstations, responding to crises, commanding the ship during battles, and representing the crew in narrative events. In other words: it’s a bit like running your own Star Trek ship, with pixel-art graphics, procedural star map, and complex mechanics to engage with.
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Minecraft
| Release date: | 2009-05-17 |
| Genre: | Sandbox |
| Developer: | Mojang |
Minecraft is the kind of game that can offer you many different experiences, and it’s up to you which ones you’ll pursue.
You could go absolutely bananas in the Creative mode, building structures and reshaping the land like a god struck with artistic purpose. Or you could go into Survival mode and eke out a living by fighting tooth-and-nail over every scrap of security and self-sufficiency.
Despite the game’s simple, cube-based aesthetic, the systems go both broad and deep. Engaging with the full complexity is entirely optional, however. Even if you don’t build weird Redstone contraptions, you can still have a functioning carrot farm, establish trade relations with a nearby village, or create enchanted gear to raid deep caves and hellish dimensions.
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Deep Rock Galactic
| Release date: | 2018-02-28 |
| Genre: | First-Person |
| Developer: | Ghost Ship Games |
Unlike FTL or Minecraft, playing Deep Rock Galactic doesn’t come bundled with potential commitment.
First of all, it’s mission-based, so you’re already given an easy-to-manage structure. Second, the missions themselves come in many types, and often they offer optional objectives you could ignore or pursue at your leisure depending on what mood strikes you.
On the other hand, commitment can be rewarding. The space dwarves you play as come in four classes with their own gear progression, there are weapon mods, and universal perks to unlock. But, in the end, it’s a game about going into alien, procedurally generated caves in a massive asteroid and using the tools at your disposal to mine all the resources you can get for fun and profit.
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Grand Theft Auto V
| Release date: | 2015-04-14 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Rockstar North |
While Skyrim further down the list is in a similar bag of broad experiences, Grand Theft Auto 5 is a better choice if you prefer a setting more realistic than high fantasy with dragons.
GTA5 is an excellent third-person open-world action game featuring three criminals who need to reconcile their differences, because the mess they got themselves into is too big for any of them working alone.
The fictional city of Los Santos is a pointed mockery of Los Angeles, and you’ll see the full vertical slice of it, from the glitz and glamour to the seedy slums. A fantastic feature of the game is that you can smoothly switch between the three protagonists, and cause mayhem (or enjoy side stories and minigames) in their shoes. Hard to be bored when you get the police on a five-star alert chasing you.
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RimWorld
| Release date: | 2016-07-15 |
| Genre: | Indie |
| Developer: | Ludeon Studios |
RimWorld is a wonder. A spiritual descendant of Dwarf Fortress, it has its magnificent ancestor’s propensity for generating incredible anecdotes you’ll be amused by for a long time.
See, you’re running a developing colony on an alien planet, and the colonists you have to work with are a mix of good and bad traits, which can often result in highly entertaining — and rather disruptive — chaos.
A RimWorld playthrough runs as long as your colony survives, which might vary greatly depending on your performance and the AI Director managing your experience. The cartoonish aesthetic and a top-down view provide just enough abstraction to make losing a colony less painful than realistic graphics would be, and it certainly makes things easier to manage and oversee.
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Rocket League
| Release date: | 2015-0707 |
| Genre: | Sports game |
| Developer: | Psyonix |
Rocket League is distilled fun, it can’t be described in any other way.
A single match takes just a few minutes at most, but once you experience the ridiculousness of playing soccer with jet-powered acrobatic cars you’ll want to stay for two, three, eight more matches. It’s a silly premise, sure, but it’s already fun if you’re only starting out, and it’s still fun if you’ve already mastered the controls and tactics.
You could play 1v1 all the way to 4v4, and car soccer isn’t the only option. There are modes inspired by ice hockey, and basketball too, as well as a way to customize the experience with alternative ball shapes, gravity changes, and more. Rocket League is video games at their purest, and any sense of boredom is guaranteed to evaporate the moment you put a hat on your car.
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
| Release date: | 2016-10-27 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Bethesda Game Studios |
Skyrim is, in some ways, similar to Minecraft, in the sense that it is happy to let you be self-motivated and do something you find fun in the moment.
You can launch it, decide “today I’m going to make magic potions” and base your entire playtime around it. Next day, when you get bored of alchemy you can decide that you’re going to be a thief and rob people blind.
Of course, there are also dragons to fight, a Civil War to take a side in, guild quests, and dungeons, but they all play into this wonderful ability to just go do something that sounds fun in the moment. This freedom makes Skyrim an experience that can not only fight a general boredom, but also stave off being bored with the game itself, just because there is so much you could be doing.
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Vampire Survivors
| Release date: | 2021-12-17 |
| Genre: | Roguelike |
| Developer: | Poncle |
Vampires Survivors is probably the most hands-off game on the list.
It’s perfect for the deepest pits of boredom where you can barely scrounge up the motivation to do much thinking or planning. In VS you’ll spend most of a “run” simply moving your character around. Characters attack on their own, so your job mostly boils down to avoiding direct contact with monsters and picking upgrades.
It’s not a complicated game, all things considered, but as it often happens, complexity and skill are there under the surface for those who seek them. Finding a winning combination of weapons and items can be a challenge of its own, and gearing up to deal with the run-ending boss is something that requires knowing the game quite well. But you can just ignore all that and rejoice in the flood of numbers.
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Mortal Kombat (series)
| Release date: | 2019-04-23 |
| Genre: | Action |
| Developer: | NetherRealm Studios |
There is some beautiful simplicity to launching a fighting game like Mortal Kombat and crushing a few skulls to feel boredom skulk away fearfully.
The series’ roster of fighters includes the full weirdo-to-professional spectrum, and the highly technical, spectacular duels (or tag-teams, as the case might be) are sure to get your mind invested and your blood pumping even before you earn a Fatality.
The MK games have a bit of a convoluted story, but Mortal Kombat 1 is a sequel/reboot, establishing a new timeline stemming from the ending of Mortal Kombat 11. If it sounds weird, that’s because it is, but you’re not going to be too lost if you hop into that new MK right away. Or, you know, you could start with MK9 and go from there.
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Hades
| Release date: | 2019-12-10 |
| Genre: | Indie |
| Developer: | Supergiant Games |
Coming back around to the genre we pretty much started with as the last entry on the list.
Hades is a ridiculously good roguelike action game about Hades’ son Zagreus trying to run away from his father’s domain for reasons you’ll discover quickly enough through conversations with the game’s many NPCs, including the Olympian gods lending their support to your escape attempts.
Your moveset is simple: move, dash, normal and special attack, plus a magic blast, but once your Olympian family starts granting you divine boons their basic functions expand significantly, providing basis for always spectacular, and potentially devastating builds. You also have six weapons, each with several unlockable variants, which will help you make it out of the Underworld.
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Boredom? More like boregone
So ends our list of games that don’t get boring anytime soon. You could always rely on them to have you back when you’re feeling bored and need something fun to do at a moment’s notice. From mission-based games to open-world sandboxes, from rogue-likes to action games, there’s something that could provide quick excitement to anyone and deliver a jolt of energy to tackles whatever else is left to do.
Hopefully, you’ve found something that matches your preferences to have on standby whenever a dull moment rears its ugly head during your day.