Conquest

Kittredge, Eberle, and Olotka are better known for the superb Cosmic Encounter, but Borderlands is almost as good a game -- and though published in the early 80s, is an uncanny precursor of many features of today's popular Eurogames.

Fracas is a world conquest game with quite primitive graphics (and a minimal soundscape) programmed in Visual Basic, with the source available from the developer, Jason Merlo. Merlo claims that it was inspired by Lords of Conquest, which he describes as "an EA Game" -- actually, it was an Eon game, published by EA in the mid-80s, and was essentially a digital implementation of their excellent boardgame Borderlands. (Eon, still sort of in existence, now operates Cosmic Encounter Online.)

Go Cross Campus is a team-based world conquest game that updates once per day. It started as a student project, and the original version of the game (and many current instances) pitted teams from different universities against each other -- e.g., at the moment, there's an Ivy League game and an ACC Championship game running.

Once each day, you log on and "energize" -- the number of points of energy starts at 5, but increases for certain things (if your team conquers at least one territory on the last turn, if you log on for 5 turns in a row, etc.). You then issue orders -- moving and/or attacking, which consumes some energy. The ultimate goal of the game is to conquer the entire map.

The key difference between Go Cross Campus and other world conquest games is that production isn't based on control of territory -- basically, the more players you have on your side energizing each turn, the more power you have in the game. So there's a strong incentive to recruit others, which is why the game was an initial hit; as many as 60% of the student body of some universities enrolled.

But the developers have also opened up some games that are open to anyone, not just folks with the right .edu address; the screenshot is of a game that started yesterday, "Political Bash 08," played on a map of the U.S., with teams representing different issues (e.g., Environment, Economic Stimulus -- the idea is pick which one you think is most important). So if you go to the site now, you can join and play the game.

Personally, I find games where you logon for a short period each day congenial; it's a way to get a daily game fix without devoting a lot of time. Not everyone likes the pace, of course. And the game does have one notable flaw; people sometimes sign up for multiple teams, meaning they have access to the private chat channels of more than one, and can "spy" for a different team. Easier to prevent this when only someone with a brown.edu email addy can join the Brown University team, impossible to police in an open game. There's a system for kicking spies out, but it's far from robust.

Still, the team-based nature of the game, the daily update, and the dependence on recruiting make Go Cross Campus both unique and original.

Full disclosure: I did some game design consulting to the developers.