I own 1,531 Steam games and have never launched 1,027 of them, so I built a slot machine that picks for me — and it’ll spin your backlog too

Like a lot of you, I've spent two decades buying games faster than any human could play them. Recently I ran the actual numbers on my library: 1,531 items, 1,027 games never launched — not "played twenty minutes and forgot," never launched — and 260 of those have been sitting there for over a decade. Clearing just the main stories of the unplayed ones would take about 13,000 hours, which works out to a year and a half of continuous play with no sleep. (I'd like to blame the sales. But I was a willing participant every time.)

Clearly the part of my brain responsible for launching games cannot be trusted with a backlog this size, so I built a machine to handle it instead:

https://magitekzed.github.io/steam-roulette/

What it does:

• Import your own library (takes about a minute — the site walks you through it)
• Set filters: never played, untouched for 5+ years, released 10+ years ago, tags, review score, or time-to-beat (via HowLongToBeat)
• Hit SPIN and the reel rolls until it lands on something you already own
• The Play button launches the result straight through Steam, so "it's not even installed" stops working as an excuse (I checked)
• Log a verdict afterward — trying it, got into it, uninstalled — and it keeps a history. Mine currently reads as evidence against me.

Privacy, because I'd want to know too: everything stays in your browser. Your library and verdicts live in localStorage, nothing gets uploaded, no accounts, no ads. Details in the FAQ comment.

My favorite filter combo is never played + a decade old + 85% positive with under 3,000 total reviews — it keeps surfacing excellent little games the internet moved on from. Including me, apparently, since I bought them, said "nice," and never thought about them again.

It's free, and I mostly made it to turn my backlog from a monument of shame into a feature. If the wheel lands on something you forgot you owned, that's the whole point.