What can we learn about games by comparing the thrill of a nailgun kill in Quake to the elation of triple word score in online Scrabble? For Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and KeyForge, it's actually quite a bit.

Taking place over progressive rounds in which you'll pick and assign your force to capture victory points over an expanding tileset, Vanguard Exiles exists because Garfield is "smitten" with autobattlers, a love he traces back to an "epiphany" he had in the 90s thinking about the different roles a computer could play in both natively digital games and what he calls "paper games".

"Yet they were both games," Garfield tells me over call, "I was playing them both digitally. The computer is vital. It serves a really good purpose, and yet, when you play [an autobattler], it feels like you're playing a paper game. You can sit back, think about your moves and understand really everything about the game before you execute, which is not the standard in a lot of digital games."

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Alienware Area-51 gaming desktop is the kind of PC that makes console players jellous. It's big, powerful, and costs as much as a used car. But if you're dropping this kind of cash, you want to make sure you're getting the best deal.

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Maybe five or ten years ago, everybody was absolutely sick of climbing towers in Ubisoft games. Are we still? I’m not sure. If you’ve never scaled one of these landmarks, possibly because you have recently arrived from Mars, let me start you off on the ground floor. The open world tower mechanic dates back to the original Assassin’s Creed in 2007, and is a simple, perennially gratifying narrative loop. It goes like this: you spy the tower on the horizon, you scuffle and shoulder through the city towards it, you savour the ensuing clamber - all those sinuous parkour animations, the wind around your ears as the urban backdrop fades - and then you get a nice view of Creation that also renders the scenery more consumable, by unfogging your map and populating it with content.

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"Do they have any tips for how to get water stains off a plastic shower floor? I've tried everything," was Graham's pitch for a question to ask PowerWash Simulator 2 devs FuturLab following the reveal event a few weeks back. They're busy game development professionals, Graham, not your personal stain assistants. What kind of unscrupulous hack would use an interview opportunity to crowdsource stain removal advice?

Anyway, here's 13 members of FuturLab sharing their top cleaning tips with us.

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I know I should finish the 15 games I already started before buying more, but then Fanatical goes and drops a Steam sale like this. With discounts hitting up to 96%, there are some absolute steals here. It would be financially irresponsible not to take advantage, Right?.

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Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series launch has been nothing short of ridiculous. Every time a new GPU hits the shelves, it disappears faster than a PS5 in 2020. The RTX 5070 Ti is no exception. Despite being one of the most anticipated mid-to-high-end cards in the Blackwell lineup, getting your hands on one at a reasonable price has been a nightmare.

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There are no wilds in Monster Hunter Wilds. Instead, beautiful dioramas. The fauna are as ferociously believable as ever, but the flora are plastic aquarium plants. You regard each new environment with wonder precisely once, then adopt the suction-hungry gaze of a Kirby-esque loot inhaler. You turn off your Seikret's auto-trundle just to feel the wind in your hair, then realise the freedom it offers is roughly analogous to the the freedom you have to stand up and scratch your bum on a bus.

"You aren't in conversation with the landscape of Wilds in the same way as you are in Breath Of The Wild or Shadow Of The Colossus," wrote Brendy. The scoutflies "reduce lush and curious environments to an all-purpose gumbo of Matrix code and button prompts," wrote Edwin. That thing about bums just now, wrote I. For all their fidelity and art direction, these biomes are laminated. Save the odd mushroom or helpful rock slide, there's no reason to interact with them in ways that reinforce their believability as real places.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I'm starting to regret phrasing it like that, to be honest. The word "selection" evokes either bureaucracy or crap small versions of chocolate bars. I'm now imagining "guy who travels to Europe because he heard the chocolate is better but can only find stale Curly Wurlys". That'd suck so bad.

This week, it's Last Call, Tacoma, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, and loads more's Nina Freeman! Cheers Nina! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for playing a bit of Split Fiction and tinkering with that new expensive camera you bought, the latest in a long line of attempts to adopt a new hobby. You're almost 40 so if this one doesn't stick you may as well just give up and start a Band Of Brothers re-watch.

For Eurogamer, Florence Smith Nicholls wrote about their experience at a Disco Elysium-inspired LARP.

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It's been a long week, hasn't it? The balm for me is that I'm spending Saturday feeding squirrels at one of my favourite Glasgow parks, and then visiting a cat cafe. It's a good time to be me. I hope you've all got a healthy dose of animal in your lives to help get you through these chilly March mornings. Games, too. Lots of games. Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

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