In no particular order:
The King is Dead
A War of Whispers
Hansa Teutonica
Citadels
Inis
Castle Combo
Kingdomino
Istanbul
Radlands
Akrotiri

Honorable mentions:
Chinatown
Meadow
Skulls of Sedlec
Let's Go! to Japan
Junk Art

i feel like i’m going mad

“now that we have mitigated the serious mental health problems”

sam it is under two months since parents filed a lawsuit claiming your product killed their son and there is a novel form of psychosis that has been named after your product

That's when I'll be old

Or if you can just set GDrive to ignore .pixi/ directories.

Although maybe this doesn't solve the problem of keeping everything in a synced folder.

You could use an environment manager that can reproduce the exact environment from a lock file (for example, Pixi) and then just store the lock file. It'll save space, too. The downside is you'll have to wait for the packages to download when you restore the backup.

I've always liked getting them to use their own machines (despite the cursed ones) so they can take it with them after the course.

When are you signing AB 566?