Checked 16 October 2026 · five cards · one afternoon

A weekly play hour on the bearing

The pile, unshuffled

I had five URLs and a Rotterdam address. The work was to open each Netherlands card, write the header, and stop. Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Alto's Odyssey. That sequence is the rank. If you came here for a sorted chart, you are in the wrong room, and I would rather say that in the first paragraph than after you have scrolled.

Stars on the day ran from 4.3 to 4.8. Download bands ran from 1M+ to 10M+. Those ranges are wide on purpose. 5M+ means the store has not shown me a tighter public count, so I will not invent 5.2 million or any other figure inside the band.

Two free, three paid

The free installs were Vampire Survivors and Alto's Odyssey, and both printed ads and in-app purchases. The paid installs were €9.99, €4.89, and €8.99. Only the Stardew Valley description said there were no in-app purchases. Dead Cells printed a purchase line on top of its price. Slay the Spire printed neither ads nor purchases in the header block.

I keep repeating the distinction because it is the whole content of the filter chips. All five, free install, paid install, in-app purchases, ads on the card. The chips do not know anything the table does not know.

What the hour did not include

I did not play a full session of each game for this filing. The desk is a listing desk. A session diary would be a different page, and it would have to be labelled as play, not as a copy of the card. Mixing those two is how a star rating starts to sound like my mood.

I also did not open the US storefront for the numbers. I did notice, in passing, that age labels and a couple of star averages were not identical there. That is why the notes name the country. A PEGI mark and a US age mark are not interchangeable words.

If a figure on the live card has moved since 16 October 2026, the corrections page is the place I will show the old line and the new one together.

Where the other notes start

Each of the five cards has its own page under the 2026 path. Those pages repeat the header figures so you can land on one of them from a search and still see the check date. This page is the hour itself: the decision not to sort, the split between free and paid, and the country I refused to mix. If the figures ever disagree between this page and a card page, the card page and the corrections log win, and I should fix the slip in public.

The chips on the home page are a view, not a sixth ranking. Hide the paid rows and the two free cards remain, both with ads and purchases. Hide the ads rows and Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, and Dead Cells remain, for different reasons: two quiet headers and one description that talks about purchases by denying them. The filter does not explain that. The notes do.