For Campaigns

• Fate Fate is very much a setting-agnostic story-building engine: The game is powered by the ebb and flow of Fate points, an out-of-game currency that makes narrative descriptors of characters and the world (“Aspects”) matter. The way this works means that meta-gaming is encouraged, which may be off-putting to some people, but in most cases I prefer the narrative effects of “players conspiring against their characters” to those that come from “playing games with secrets and revelations”. I have played some one shots and a marvellous “Mythos against Logos” campaign set in mythological/ancient Greece. I have liked the game where I saw it, and I think I could do even better – I have mostly GMed Fate, with some play experience from the initial sessions of a Star Wars campaign.
• Dungeon World / Apocalypse World It may not be fair lumping these two games together entirely, but DW is a deep hack of AW, that is, a setting translation, which in the case of games Powered by the Apocalypse essentially means re-writing the system from first principles, because setting and system are fundamentally intertwined. PbtA games very much run on tropes: The moves, obvious choices of what a player can have their character do, explicitly express genre conventions about – for example – the Ranger being easily able to “follow a trail of clues left behind by passing creatures”. Because they are small, distinct chunks of setting-encapsulating rules, the systems are easy to learn, but lack an overall unified mechanic – although there are many moves that say “Roll 2d6+X. On 6–, interesting misadventure; on 7–9 success at cost; on 10+ success”, this is by far not the only way a move can work, and the specifics of “success” vary. I have GMed and rarely played these games in games of various lengths, and because they are uncommon, but easy to pick up, they are my go-to games to GM at conventions.
• Mouse Guard Mouse Guard is a game about trying to be a hero in a dangerous world, where many things are out to eat you (literally, because you are a mouse with a cloak and a glorified toothpick, and there are wolves, weasels, hawks and so on out there), but you are not alone. You are one of the guard, and that's why you have your spear and your cloak and the determination that it doesn't matter what you fight, but what you fight for! The core interesting mechanic is the ebb and flow between the pressures from missions and the limited time the Guardmice can spend in civilization, following up longer-term goals and resting and recovering. The mechanics may be slightly jarring to people who don't like metagaming: The more you play to the disadvantages of your character during the patrol (or GM) turn, the more spotlight you get during the players' turn to pursue whatever you find worth pursuing. Big conflicts (fight, chase, argument, whatever) are played out using a hidden-action-selection method with an abstract disposition measuring how far the sides are to achieving their goals. This system took some getting used to, but now it's running very smoothly. I have GMed campaigns and convention games of Mouse Guard, and I keep coming back. It would be lovely to play it for once, but the campaign I am GMing at the moment (i.e. summer 2017) is also very rewarding.

For a session or an adventure

• Montsegur 1244 is not a light-hearted beer and pretzle game. Very much the opposite. This is a game about delving deeply into the mindset of strongly religious people and trying to understand how that works. The scenes are played out in freeform, but the framing of scenes follows a strict predetermined narrative, and we know that in the end at least one main character will voluntarily choose being burned at the stake instead of rejecting their belief. I have played it three times. While it's quite straining, completing the game is quite a cathartic (no pun intended) experience with the right kind of people, and I am willing (“happy” is not the right term, you see) to play it again from time to time.
• Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage in a smuggler skyship that has recently been captured by an imperial cruiser, in this tiny standalone game where the rules fit on the bottom half of the character sheet. The rules are amazing. They condense genre expectations (adventure, escalation, personal moments, character focus) and give very strong, but not pushy incentives to play the character to the hilt. Characters and the starting situation are predefined and the setting is very sketchy, with – together with the rules set – makes this excellent for one shots and convention play. And yet, even though I have played and GMed this a small number of times, it's never the same and has a great replay value.
• Torchbearer is a gritty dungeon delver game based on Mouse Guard, so a lot of my comments about MG above also applies to this. The pressure in Torchbearer is the dungeon, with its darkness (did you bring enough torches?), dead ends (did you bring enough rations?) and promises (you are worn out, but the next room might contain many treasures! It might also contain something that might eat you, though, so yo you want to risk it?). Torchbearer is more rules-intricate than MG, though, and requires quite a chunk of prep from the GM, which is why I haven't played it more than twice – with the same adventure, an avalanche-buried Dwarven wayhouse each. Basically, your dungeon should be about twice as large as you imagine the party will manage in a one-shot, following some notes on rpg.se that's a set of about 10 rooms which you need to know the ecology of.
• Fiasco prides itself to be “a game of powerful ambition and poor impulse control”. It's a GM-less freeform game inspired by the movies where some ordinary people have big plans and even bigger desires, but not enough competence, so everything goes wrong for nearly everybody in the end. (It also works nicely with Icelandic Sagas. There's a helpful sheet for facilitating Fiasco and I've had some good games and spread this game further.
• Microscope is yet another GM-less game, this one is about building a linear history in a non-linear fashion by zooming in on interesting periods, events and scenes. Microscope is probably the least an “RPG” of all the games in these lists. You don't play the same character throughout the game and actually outside of scenes, individual characters don't really matter at all. Unless you really concentrate and have good reason to stay on the serious side, the histories coming out of Microscope tend to be a bit whacky, but that hasn't kept me from facilitating it several times to different groups, with good games coming out of it most of the time.
• A Parsely is a game in the spirit of text adventures or interactive fiction games, except that a human with a sheet of paper replaces the parser. Parselys work nicely in a quiet corner of a group staying somewhere, or as forum games. (In that context, I should probably list Atop a lonely tower and Doomed Pilgrim, from the Sundered Lands, as well.)

Because I haven't organized it yet

• More role playing game poems – Often really strange shortform (the target is 15 minutes) games exploring one theme or method. There's a big list in a Google spreadsheet, and it generally links to the source.
• Roll for Shoes – A minimal game written for light-hearted improvisation games. At some point I thought about running a large drop-in-drop-out table of it starting as “Dungeon Ball” as an RPG introduction, but I have never even got round to playing it straight at a normal game table yet.
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchhausen – A very stylish game about telling extraordinary adventure stories. You play a group of noble drinking buddies engaged in a story-telling competition with much one-upmanship.

Because I don't feel able to GM or facilitate it (yet)

• Shock: Social Science Fiction (Science Fiction as in “What do replicators do to society?” and not as in “Yea! Replicators! Nice macguffin, why should society change from that?”)
• Ars Magica (All medieval myths are true, and you are a wizard)
• Dogs in the Vinyard (you are a 14 year old, given a gun and a book and the authority to be the justice in the wild west)
• Great Ork Gods – A beer&pretzle game about the short lives of orcs, gouverned by their, gods who hate them: The Gods (who set the difficulties of tasks) are played by the other players, so this game is nearly/easily GM-less and targeting fast, ridiculous action.
• More games powered by the Apocalypse – There are some gems among those games and I am a big fan of the system. However, most of them I haven't even seen, not to mention read or internalized.

Because it needs very specific people

• Breaking the Ice (Two players, playing two people dating)
• Everway (An ancient RPG using arcana cards)

If someone nice runs a campain and I have nothing better to do

• Diaspora
• InSpectres
• Legend of the five Rings
• Star Wars: Edge of the Empire/Age of Rebellion/Force and Destiny – There are some cool Star Wars-y mechanics in there.
• Cortex Plus, eg. Firefly – I played a campaing of Firefly in 2016 until early 2017, but the system didn't sing for us. It was good, but it had its issues. In particular, it feels very Fate-like, but it lacks Compels (it effectively only has self-Compels) and the collaboration focus at the table is less prominent.

If someone asks

I will not actively look for sessions of these games, because they are not my priority now, but these are games I liked enough to be happy to play them again. If you are interested in playing them, tell me!

• FreeMarket (Transhumanist Science Fiction RPG: What do you do on a space station, if you are practically immortal and all basic needs are taken care of?)
• Wilderness of Mirrors (You are a group of spies. Has some very interesting mechanics, among them a two-way split: First the planning/legwork, where you come up with complications and solutions, and then the implementation, where stuff actually happens.)
• Sundered Lands (any)
• Sagas of the Icelanders
• Cheat your own adventure
• The Quiet Year
• Dog eat dog (How does colonization affect the locals? How can they retain their cultural identity and get rid of the foreign power?)

If someone else organizes a one-shot

These games sounded nice enough when I heard about them first that I picked up a copy of the rules. However, when I actually read the rules in more detail, my immediate urge to play them was reduced. That is not to say I won't be willing to play them! I just won't put any energy into organizing play myself. Whoever wants to run one of these can borrow my copy of the rules, but I'm not pushing for it.

• Hillfolk is the reference implementation of Robin D. Laws' “Drama System”. It is written for high-stakes interpersonal conflict, where emotional strife between the characters matters more than the characters versus the outside world. It never clicked with me.
• Bubblegumshoe is a Gumshoe game about kid sleuths. I've not been convinced by the Esoterrorists, another Gumshoe game about horror investigators. I don't much appreciate horror, but in this case it's more that I didn't come to gripes with the system. However, I have heard good things about Bubblegumshoe, in particular about its relationships mechanic, so I would give it a try.
• Eclipse Phase (If the existential dread is turned down)
• Aγων (Competitive)
• Blood Red Sands – Competitive rules-intricate dark fantasy. Actually, by the rules you have to play a tournament of several sessions, but that's asking a lot.
• Prime Time Adventures

Games I tried and they didn't stick

• D&D 5 – It's okay, far better than the other editions I've played of it, but it still doesn't address what I want in RPGs as much as the other games.
• D&D 3.5, Pathfinder
• D&D 4
• Hârnmaster I used to enjoy the very pseudo-medieval deep realism. My preferences have changed.
• Midgard This was the first system I tried. For quite some time, I liked it quite a lot, these days I still appreciate the world and would borrow heavily from it for any generic fantasy I play, but I get the impression Midgard doesn't know what it's about, and that's a severe disadvantage in my book.
• Shadowrun I loved the Magicpunk setting. I'd still play in the setting or something similar, less retro and with some different focus on other social issues, I guess.
• Scion The game was fun while it lasted, but it's god-awful (pun intended) at doing mythology.
• Worlds of Darkness These games are not what they want to be about, and I like to steer my character's character, not have dice decide their morality. (Also, if done properly, they would be horror. I don't like horror.)
• Death Watch Not my setting (dark crazy space magic), not my character types (guns-blazing space marines), not my system (strong classes, trap options, strong levels)

Games I own that I don't think I'll play

• Burning Wheel, Burning Empires I prefer its smaller siblings Torchbearer and Mouse Guard, BW is quite a chunk of game and apparently requires some system mastery to be proper fun, which I'm not willing to acquire.
• The Riddle of Steel It started from some presumably good ideas about medieval sword fighting and making “what you fight for” important. I think I encountered a fan project looking for a 2nd edition at some point, I might have a look again if something comes out of that.
• GURPS (Lite) I like specific games, and low-rules ones.