Reus

Hopefully, you and yours had a merry Christmas... I've had a fine one so far, but it's incomplete at the moment (product of my brother's divorce), so I don't have tales of wondrous gifts received to relate for now.  However, that doesn't mean that I'm at-ends for things to play with... this is, after all, also the season for cheap games, via sales on XBox Live, Steam, and other sources.  One such game that I can recommend as "worth checking out" would be Reus, a peculiar take on the "god-game" genre that comes back every few years.

In Reus, you play the role of a small barren world, looking to flourish with life, especially human life.  To aid in this goal, you command four titans (which I'll call Ocean, Mountain, Forest, and Swamp), each of which starts with a limited set of abilities they can use.  For example, one of the first things you will end up doing is using Ocean to build an ocean, one of the other three to prepare some adjacent habitable territory, then seeding that territory with something "of interest" to people to get a settlement to start up.  Settlements are key to this game... the humans that live there come up with projects they want to pursue on their own, but it's in your best interest to help them along, since completed projects result in "ambassadors" from the humans, which can be used to unlock new abilities for your titans.

You help the humans by adding new patches of resources to the area within their settlements, or modifying/mutating already existing resources... and those resources interact with each other in various ways.  For example, one of the first things you're likely to run across in a forest settlement is a project that requires a significant amount of food to complete.  To pursue that, you could use Ocean's "domestic animals" ability to deposit some chickens, or you could use Forest's "edible plants" ability to deposit some blueberries... or you could do both, and get a bonus for the chickens from the blueberries... or you could plant more blueberries, then use another of Forest's abilities to convert a patch into strawberries, significantly increasing the food output of the blueberries... or do all three, or work out other combinations based on what your giants are able to do, and the space they have to do it in.

Of course, if it were all simple and easy like that, it wouldn't be much of a game, just min/max your way to victory... but of course, these are humans you're dealing with.  Give them too much too fast, and they start to get greedy, decide to attack their neighbors, maybe even attack your titans themselves.  You can mitigate this somewhat, with resources that produce Awe or Danger in addition to their other benefits, but your best bet is to control the rate of growth of those settlements.  Still, sometimes it's necessary to mete out a little punishment, and Mountain and Swamp have the tools to do that... heck, sometimes it's even worthwhile to dole out some not-entirely-merited punishment, such as when one town is trying to build you a sacrificial altar, where part of the completion cost is the destruction of a neighboring town.  Of course, it's your world, so you make the call as to whether that's the "right" thing to do (in my case, I passed when it was a sacrificial altar, but when I had a druid go mad and start down the path to mad science, I helped him along with that).

That's the gameplay in a nutshell... but there are two more items of note.  First is that this game has an "achievements" system, which actually does something... in this case, unlocking achievements actually unlocks new abilities for future games.  Second is that the "standard" game has a time limit attached, so, for example, you have 30 minutes of game time to complete what you want to complete, before your titans run out of steam... you have the ability to pause the game while you're plotting and planning, so it's not a burden.  Rather, it's somewhat refreshing having a strategy game that will stop for you after an hour or two of play (unless of course you decide to continue in Free Play mode, where you don't earn achievements... again, that's a call for you to make).  All in all, I've thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game so far... I'd say give it a go, even more so if you find it on sale again.