My big phone still had one thing I did want to drop - Warhammer 40k Tacticus.
You see, I am a huge Warhammer nerd. Like a having-a-ton-of-plastic-dudes-at-40 huge.
And Tacticus is a pretty cool game, don't get me wrong. It has real gameplay, decision making, stakes. But in the meantime it's a grindfest. 1 to 2 hours daily. And progress is slow. And gated.
So after 4 years give or take, I decided to delete it from my phone.
So far so good.
But that left a hole in my life - gaming. Which given my life up until this point is a pretty strange place to be.
I've been a gamer since I was 7. Back in the 90s. We didn't really have huge access back then, but one thing we had was Famiclones - cheap Chinese bootleg Nintendo Famicoms.
That's how I got hooked. One day my parents brought home one of those machines. With Tetris and Super Mario Bros on it. And a really great coop game - BattleCity
And since then I've been gaming in one form or another - thousands of hours in Diablo 2 or World of Warcraft, 400+ games in my Steam library, consoles and handhelds laying around my house.
But ever since my son was born I morphed into that mythical creature - The Dad Gamer. It loves to play games, but doesn't really know when to.
My escape hatch was mobile gaming. Dump an hour in a treadmill style game with the morning coffee and move on with my responsibilities.
And I do realize that no amount of rationalization will turn that into gaming, but here we are.
Digging through The Box (I hope by this time you've realized that The Box is not a single box) I found my old Nintendo DSLite.
A quick cargo pocket check and it's now a big part of my EDC, filling the hole Tacticus left.
Games can be played pretty much on and off. You decide you are done for now just close the lid and the game just sits there. Open it up again and continue from where you left.
Add on R4 card, dump some ROMs on it and be on your merry way.
There are tons of cool games, designed to be played on the go so the "pick and put down" gameplay is usually baked in. Battery life is pretty fine and spare batteries are still being sold.
So my smoke breaks are now spent solving puzzles with Professor Layton instead of tapping "Raid" mindlessly.
And honestly, for this old Dad Gamer, that is pretty rad.