Ask any gamer to imagine their favourite games cross-dressing as different genres and you'll have yourself an entertaining waste of an afternoon. Turn that into a drinking game somehow and you'll have some of the best ideas that nobody can remember ("Hey! What about Bejewelled as a drinking game! You'd have a grid of colourful shooters...") and probably the most fun hangover ever. There would probably be rules to where and how you could feel bad and an inexplicable set of text parser puzzles to solve. These things happen.

Ask the Game.Dev forum regulars to do the same thing and you get this ton of stuff to play through. Each one a fragment of a parallel universe where Team 17 were German boardgame designers, Valve had paper instead of the Source engine or Cliffy_B grew up a hikkikomori instead of a disco pirate with a scanner.

Then you have to judge them... Well, I do. You can, but mine's better. Whatever. Those of you that are boring and want to go straight to the results and play the top 3, click here.

Reviews

Gears of War: The Minesweeper! – Nandrew

Starting out our trifecta of Gears of War re-imaginings (Hah! I've always wanted to use that word) in this competition is perhaps the most abstract of them all: Play Marcus and our lovable Delta Squad heroes as though their entire world was... A Minesweeper game?

To be fair, there aren't really mines that need to be defused. Instead you have to dispatch Locusts that the game gives you two sets of information about: Each square revealed tells you how many Locusts neighbour it and the colour of a square tells you the most powerful type of Locust nearby. Clicking on a known "mine" square doesn't end your game, you end the Locust and take damage according to the type of Locust you've just curb-stomped. Drones don't hurt too much, but Boomers and Elite Guards take a concerted jab at the crimson omen that represents your closeness to death. Explore squares that aren't Locust infested and your health regenerates. So far so good, sounds interesting, right? Oh but you haven't run into the ITEMS yet.

That's right, items. Scattered around the map are items that could help you out in your quest to destroy Locusts and maximise your final score (because that's how wars a really measured!). Some are passive and always active, others need to be used to function and have limited charges. These items aren't indicated by any numbers or colours, so finding them is sheer luck, but it's the best kind of fortune when you do. Especially when you've just found Cole, whose jubilant whoops scare nearby Locust so much they actively become weaker. The wide range of items is what really makes the game: Everything from finding Colonel Hoffman and his awesome hax [! – Ed], to Betty's Locust crushing wheels, or even "finding" a torque bow bolt protruding from your armor... This is an amazingly well done evolution of Minesweeper's play mechanics with Gears of War's mythos and elements. It's synergistic, even. The "just one more go" feeling is strong with this one - This time you might even find Maria!