20 Best Board Wipes in Magic: The Gathering

Drywood termites are remarkably good at disappearing into the very material they destroy. Instead of building obvious nests, they can spend nearly their entire lives hidden inside beams, framing, furniture, and other dry wood, slowly carving out galleries as a colony grows. That hidden existence makes them difficult to find and difficult to eliminate. But researchers at the University of California, Riverside identified a biological weakness that termites cannot hide from: they have to molt.

With an unmanageably colossal heap of demos on offer, a massive number of which look to be filled with AI-generated garbage, the current Steam Next Fest is a serious bummer. How on earth is any adult with limited free time supposed to muck through the stables of slop to find something worthwhile? Increasingly, people have been creating ad hoc slop-free recommendation lists on social media in addition to sharing browser plugins and other tools that people can use to filter out games that have a genAI disclosure. But even with tools to separate the good game wheat from the slop chaff, that’s still a lot of games to sift through, so I’m gonna throw my own recommendation onto the pile with the only demo I’ve made time for this Next Fest: Fallbearers. I found the game via Bluesky, wooed to its Steam page by the game’s trailer alone. Imagine a game that combines Bennet Foddy’s track-and-field simulator QWOP with the “Coffin Flop” bit from Tim Robinson’s HBO sketch show I Think You Should Leave—that’s Fallbearers. In it, you—by yourself or you with a friend—control two Victorian-era pallbearers as they try to transport the dearly departed from the hearse to the grave.

The wonderful thing about video games is that they can take something that is, quite frankly, terrible, and turn it into an experience where you can't help but think "just five more minutes. " Incremental games often have that effect, and Selkie's Salvage&Co. is no different in that regard, it's just the funny thing is that it is essentially a game about taking your rubbish out. That is bastardising it. The setting for the world is one where the entire planet is flooded, and you, a robot created by an anthropomorphic rat girl (the titular Selkie) who I can already predict salacious fan art of, have to clean up a whole bunch of trash from it by fishing it out. This starts slow of course, all you have is you, your fishing rod, and a magnetic arm that can't carry all that much. The more trash you collect and feed into a grinder, the more you can steadily increase your capabilities.