Teamfight Tactics

Me covering a recent and popular game here? What is this? Still, I played quite many Teamfight Tactics games over the past few days, and I figured there's no excuse as to why it wouldn't qualify.

Teamfight Tactics (or TFT for short) is a separate game in the League of Legends universe and client, probably created due to the huge popularity of the Dota 2 Auto Chess mod. (Which, as I hear, isn't original either, but based off of some already existing but not so well known game.)
It's not a very complicated game. It's an 8-player FFA that happens in 1v1 rounds until the last person is alive. Between each round you get some money and a selection of 5 champions with increasing prices as the rounds go on. You buy some of those champions, deploy them on the battlefield, try to gather 3-of-a-kind duplicates to combine and power them up, and try to get various numbers of role duplicates that also give bonuses. Refresh your pool of 5 for a small sum if you don't get what you like, or spend to level up yourself to deploy more champions. There also exist combinable items from minion rounds and some champion draft rounds. Otherwise, each round you're pit against another player, and your champions battle it out to the death without any further input from you.

Honestly, it's simple but fun and fast enough. I have just two main problems with it.
For one, it just doesn't have enough depth. You don't have a lot of choices to make, and you're eventually going to settle into some technique(s), even if the choice of technique is influenced by what champions you're given and, if you manage to track that, what your opponents are building. Very fine details aside, it stops being a game of skill, but rather just repeating the same few sets and combinations of motions.
Secondly, and everyone complains about this, the RNG is too much. Sure, some is necessary to keep the game fun through unpredictability and forcing to adapt, and if you're given overall hundreds of champions as choices each game, it somewhat balances out that you're lucky on some rolls, unlucky on others. However, the minion rounds that are the main income of items, which play a huge role in your performance, also drop a random amount of items. While, sure, it's fair in that everyone has the same odds, it's completely possible that you will get either double or half the amount someone else does, which either spells out very good odds of winning, or your near-certain loss. If you're playing to win, you might as well quit if the first minion rounds do not bless you with enough items, to save time. Much like playing with a missing teammate, your odds are grim, and while the game might still last a while, it's hardly fun.

Still, the game is supposedly in beta, probably rushed out to get a slice of the hot pie, and hopefully more improvements are incoming in the following weeks and months. For now, I'm already tired of it, for the two reasons mentioned above. However, it's free and fun while you don't know it very well yet, so I'd give it a "why not" recommendation. Play it for a few hours and see what all the fuss is about so you could talk along the next time someone inevitably brings up one of these kinds of games.