Games I Read During My Mandated Burnout Break

I love the work I do. Tabletop games are the perfect blend of creative expression, community bonding, and cultural meaning-making. To play a game is to know yourself, your friends, and your world more fully; to write about them is to see how it all ties together. I'm grateful every day that it’s what I get to do for a living. But folks, I’m burnt out. 

Burnout, a concept first described by Herbert Freudenberger and Sigmund Ginsburg in the 1970s, has become a normalized bit of psychobabble to encompass the mental and physical toll taken working under capitalism entails. According to Mercer’s 2024 Global Talent Trends report, which surveyed over 12,000 workers worldwide, roughly 80% of employees are at risk of burnout. It exists in nearly every sector, with journalists facing some of the highest rates. In a political climate where disinformation is omnipresent, trust in the press is at an all time low, and autocrats can imprison journalists or sue even major outlets into capitulation, it's a difficult landscape to navigate.

So after a rough month and frantic PAX Unplugged, my coworkers (bless them) demanded that I take some time off. And I did. Sort of. It's just that even in my off time, I think about games. As much as they’re my job, they’re also my passion. However, I only had so much time and energy to engage with these pieces of art, either as texts or through play. Largely, I read them through the lens of how easy they were to dive into with a mind functioning at partial, brain soup-levels of capacity. These games acted as an offramp for the hamster wheels in my mind that refused to stop spinning when “work” was no longer a viable outlet. 

Without further ado, here’s a list of games I read and/or played during the five days I had off. I would’ve written a shorter article, if I only had the time.