I love Factorio, but my brain is to smooth for 3D production hell. It’s really funny to me how fast I get to „what the hell was I thinking“ in Satisfactory.
I got burned with the Stardew Valley board game - it's very cute, but also not a great game. And for my non-designer brain it's way easier to translate Stardew into a boardgame than Terraria. I will definitely wait out some reviews and the BGG forums...
It’s a bit „old man yells at cloud.jpg“, but I don’t like that we as the target audience have accepted MT in full price titles like we did. I remember a time where a fancy cosmetic was rewarded in game for some feat and not outright bought. I remember when your initial purchase got you the whole nine yards.
And I feel that „its only cosmetics“ misses the point - looking cool IS a major part of fun gameplay for (some/many/most) people.
But yeah, that train has sailed a long time ago. I know…
Ready or Not and Ground Branch are the obvious choices.
The Stalker: Anomaly mod pack is also quite hard, less so because of tactics and more so because of bullshit. But its free.
Wildcard: Ghost Recon: Wildlands. On default difficulty its a stupid popcorn shooter, but if you crank all the difficulty settings up (they call it „advanced mode“ IIRC) it becomes really fun. Most people like to shit on the typical Ubisoft formula in Breakpoint and Wildlands, but I enjoyed my time with both.
If you are not married to 1st person, Zero Sievert and Doorkickers are worth a look too.
In it you write JavaScript to hack things to be able to write more JavaScript to hack more things. It's very fun. Especially if you don't know how to write any JavaScript.
Disclaimer: Never played Star Realms, but I assume it is very similar to Hero Realms.
And no, it's not similar at all. There is a lot of stuff added on top in Undaunted that makes it not a deck builder in the primary sense. You move your troops around on the battlefield; positioning, cover and distance are as impactful as the stats on the troops cards. Also there are only a handful of different card types - scout, gunner, machine gunner, sniper and mortar. All cards of a type are technically identical.
You could think of the deck as both your "health bar" and your available options per round.
Each troop token on the battlefield is represented by several cards in your deck (the soldiers that compose that troop). If your enemy hits, you discard one of those cards from the unit they hit. If you can't do that any longer, you remove the token from the battlefield.
Also the cards dictate the options you can do per turn, such as move, fire, taking cover etc. That means if you don't pull the "bravo scout" card, you can't use the bravo scout token this round.
Summarizing: Undaunted is a great - snappy, easy, elegant, but also deep - "dudes on a map" game. But if you expect "only" a deck builder, you would have the wrong picture.
Squad always got me with its sound design. Nothing too fancy, just guns and explosions. But they DO sound amazing.