The Diner Dash series popularized this simulation category sub-genre, which focuses on specific tasks and challenges you to perform them at an ever-more-frantic pace. The Diner Dash games, starring a spunky waitress named Flo, put you in charge of a restaurant where you must seat customers, take their orders, and deliver food to their tables before they start becoming impatient. You’ll need to clean up after them as quickly as possible so you can bring in new patrons and maximize your earnings before closing time.

Burger Shop 2 expands on that idea with a new goal: rebuilding the restaurant empire you assembled during the first game. Cook orders in the BurgerTron2000 and serve them to hungry customers before they get tired of waiting. Serve over 100 different dishes from breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus as you progress through 120 story levels, during the course of which you’ll discover how you lost your fast food kingdom. You’ll encounter interesting characters and earn over 100 trophies and awards along the way.

If you’d rather serve up a different kind of food, try Youda Sushi Chef, which features six restaurants you can customize with unique names and decorations. Your goal is to reach a daily target for sales as you slice up various sushi dishes as quickly as possible. Customers calling with reservations keep you on your toes, while to-go orders allow you to earn extra cash, if you can spare a few moments away from the people waiting for their meals. Buy upgrades to serve your customers faster.

Ever since the early days of Tetris, people have enjoyed taking quick breaks with action-oriented puzzle games, so it’s no surprise that this genre is also very popular on digital download services. Over the years, developers have brought many twists to Alexey Pajitnov’s basic concept.

Pipe Mania challenges you to keep up with the constant flow of Flooze as you lay down various pipe pieces and try to stop the goopy glop from backing up. More than 70 levels present seven different themes while the game’s five modes include the classic original Pipemania, which was published for the Macintosh, among other platforms, in 1989. Play solo or cooperatively with a friend.

A variety of game modes also star in Ancient Quest of Saqqarah, which stars the magical monkey Khufu, who seeks to uncover the ancient mystery behind the pyramid of Saqqarah. You’ll solve over 500 puzzles in seven different styles of the match-three paradigm. Three difficulty levels add to the challenge.

If mysteries wrapped in distinctive gameplay are up your alley, World of Goo offers plenty of both. Drag and drop millions of squishy Goo Balls to build everything from bridges to cannonballs as you solve puzzles and explore their strange world. Each species of Goo Ball features unique abilities, but none of them realize they’re in a game, nor that they’re very delicious to the creatures they encounter.

Myst pioneered adventure games set in lush, mysterious landscapes, and many developers have followed the trail blazed by the Miller brothers in 1993.

Coyote’s Tale: Fire and Water stars the trickster god Coyote, who guides you through a quest to take on challenges from 15 Aztec gods and collect the hidden items that will stop the world from falling into chaos. Play as the sisters Tletl and Atl, exploring 20 scenic Mexican environments and eventually encountering a plot twist involving the betrayal of one by the other.

A twist of a different sort involves Flo, star of the Diner Dash series and now a part-time detective helping Bernie the Bookworm solve 25 mysteries plaguing Diner Town. Many of them may seem silly, like “Who stuck their finger in all the jelly donuts?”, but there’s a final head-scratcher that afflicts all of the town’s residents. DinerTown Detective Agency features 20 unique locations and four mini-games.

Board games served as the original inspiration for early strategy games, which have since evolved to take advantage of the horsepower available in today’s computers.

Blitzkrieg takes you back in time to World War II, where you’ll find more than 80 historically accurate missions spread across the Soviet, German, and western Allied military campaigns. Maneuver over 200 types of vehicles, along with trains, coastal artillery, and other large units, into positions of support for your soldiers. Everything in the landscape, which includes more than 250 types of buildings and other objects, is destructible, and you can steal and use enemy equipment, if you get the opportunity. Build bridges, dig trenches, lay mines, and call for air support in one of the most realistic strategy games you’ve ever played.

For a war of a very different type, travel further back in history to 1930-era Chicago and the cat-and-mouse games between the Mafia and police. The side you choose dictates your style of gameplay: the police must interrogate witnesses and collect information before heading into showdowns with their adversaries while the Mafia battles not only law enforcement but also competing gangs, using stealth as often as brute force.

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons introduced us to the concept of controlling a character who navigates a fantastic environment. As that character progresses through a series of stories, he grows more powerful and faces deadlier adversaries.

Depths of Peril places you in the role of a faction leader protecting the barbarian city Jorvik from rival factions. Embark on quests and destroy monsters as you build your wealth and power. Use diplomacy and trade to deal with rival factions, resorting to combat when necessary, but don’t anger the powerful Legion of Fear or you’ll risk bringing their wrath down on your head. More than 40 short stories give you a sense of the game world’s depth.

Immersive storytelling is also a hallmark of Kult: Heretic Kingdoms, in which you play a young female inquisitor tasked with rooting out and destroying the game world’s last shreds of religion. You’re sent to destroy a relic considered to be a threat, but soon you find yourself in the middle of a war between two secret societies. Decide whether to play as an altruistic heroine, as a selfish egoist, or something in between as your actions send you hurtling toward one of six different endings to the story.

Shoot-‘em-ups have been a staple of videogames ever since Space Invaders took arcades by storm in 1978. Today, however, you can get your adrenaline rush in a more visceral way, thanks to first-person shooters, which burst on the scene with a fiery blast from 1993’s break-out hit, Doom.

Do you like cake? Then you’ll want to guide main character Chell through the ingenious puzzles found in Portal, a first-person shooter with a unique take on the genre. Chell wakes up in a stark research facility and is directed through a series of increasingly-complicated experiments by an overhead computer voice named GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System); Chell is promised cake and grief counseling when she’s done.

Chell’s only weapon is a portal gun: she fires it at a wall, ceiling, or floor to create a path to another room or an inaccessible area of the current one. Sometimes she must carry boxes through the portals and drop them on switches. Soon, however, Chell discovers that GLaDOS’ motives are not as benign as they first seemed, and she finds herself simply trying to survive.

Those offbeat sensibilities continue in Team Fortress 2, an online multiplayer game in which you choose between nine character classes divided into offense, defense, and support roles. Each class has a unique personality, such as The Heavy, an enormous Russian who gives names to his powerful guns. Players divide into two teams — Reliable Excavation & Demolition (RED) and Builders League United (BLU) — and square off on more than 20 maps that feature various game modes, including capture the flag and the ever-popular team deathmatch.