I love playing games with my friend, but I'm not really a fan of many of the games they play. While I always have my armada of card gamers, the options I have with the people beyond that group tends to slim down a lot. I like games that require practice and repition, precision and thought until you crack the thing, and ideally ones where I have all the information at my fingertips. Most of my friends like to play shooters and first person, 3d style action games. It's not a very good match, as I very quickly just get ambushed and die by something I never saw because I forgot that I should be looking around corners.

Recently, though, I've found a very cool new way of engaging with them. Archipelago is a randomizer that allows you to connect many different games into one larger shared experience. Each objective in a game is split into a check and a reward. The check is what you need to do to achieve the objective, and the reward is what you'd get for completing that objective normally. For example, in Hollow Knight, an objective could be finding a grub lost in the wild. This would be split into two items, the part where you find the grub and the part where the game sends that grub off to the grubfather to eventually be eaten and then turn into a grubberfly (it's a strange game). The mod takes all these sets of checks and rewards and randomizes them, so finding a grub in your game may result in sending a star to your friend playing Super Mario 64.

It's incredible how it connects people over things they otherwise wouldn't care about at all. Hearing my friends Ethan and Robin bickering like an old married couple about getting checks in Dark Souls III and Subnautica, games that they individually greatly enjoy but wouldn't really be engaged in the other's playthrough if it weren't for this forced involvement. People getting excited about the accomplishments of others or engineering weird workarounds to the strange situations that emerge from randomly assorted resources are so cool. I've particularly enjoyed randomizers for JS Paint (essentially just MS Paint), something I'd only reccomend if you're incredibly patient, Terraria, which just has so many angles to approach it that the randomness tends to get you into very interesting scenarios, Archipela-Go, a fully Archipelago based game that has you walking to locations in the real world to clear checks.

As with any highly modular experience, there are some ways of setting it up that can lead to better experiences. I haven't seen these thoughts collected anywhere online, so I'll put mine down here.

• One important thing to try to balance is the number of checks in each game. I wish the mods had this displayed in their read-me somewhere, but for now they can at least be checked on generation if you're using APWorld. If the checks are imbalanced, it could lead to certain players not impacting the group playthrough as much, which doesn't feel too great. If people do want to play games of different sizes, consider trying multiple smaller games to match someone else's larger one.
• The best games for this are somewhat nonlinear. If your game only really has one angle of attack you can get stuck much more frequently, which can stall out the process for all players involved.
• It's extra fun to pick a game that you're a subject expert on. Often times people will want to spectate your progress and ask questions about what's exactly happening or if you can reach a certain goal for them, and being able to share your process is some of the most fun that can be had with this mod.

At some point I'll finish my own archipelago mod for ITG. When that happens, I'll append it here. For now, all games with known Archipelago mods have been collected into this spreadsheet. If you're at all interested, I highly reccomend you give it a try (: