An 'Overwhelmingly Positive' idle game about plastic ducks floating in a pool has a collectible card-game successor, and there's a demo you can play now

The player clutches a hand of cards in front of conjoined blue and yellow boards resting on a mushroom-dotted tree stump.

I am often in a state of delighted befuddlement at the games which prove popular on Steam, but few have simultaneously thrilled and baffled me as much as the success of Placid Plastic Duck Simulator. The game, which is really more of an interactive screensaver, involves guiding a rubber duck around a pool filled with other plastic ducks. There are 50 rubber ducks to find and a few other things to see if you can be bothered. But if you can't, that's OK too. As the game's own Steam description reads "live in the present moment, enjoy life".

Since it released in 2022, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator has racked up an 97% 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Steam rating out of more than 15,000 reviews, making it the 127^th top-rated game on all of Steam, according to SteamDB.