Grand Strategy

Stéphane Bura is an eminent game designer, of both digital and tabletop games, as well as something of a game design theorist. His War and Peace is more of a thought experiment than a game; it is, he proclaims a "one-button Civilization". You make only one decision during play: to toggle between "peace" and "war."

Update: One of the fellows on the Paradox forums pointed out that you can simply copy the music from your EU II folder to the folder for For the Glory, so I can now unreservedly recommend the game.

One of the best games I ever played was 1480: The Age of Exploration -- a game that is no longer extant. Indeed, I suspect that the whole genre of similar games -- there were a handful -- is now extinct.

Rise of the West dates back to 1994, and looks as if it had been developed for Windows 3; it's a freeware implementation of Empires of the Middle Ages, Dunnigan's excellent boardgame which we reviewed a few days ago.

Jim Dunnigan is one of a handful of designers to have published in excess of a hundred games (it helps to run your own game company for a decade), and in my opinion, Empires of the Middle Ages is one of his best designs -- possibly the best of them all.

Supreme Ruler, like Making History or Europa Universalis, is an extraordinarily detailed and complex grand strategic game covering the entire globe, with economic, military, and diplomatic aspects. As long-time readers may know, I'm a sucker for this kind of game.

Unlike the others, Supreme Ruler is set in the modern world -- sort of. It's set in a hypothetical near future, which is canny of BattleGoat but also somewhat disappointing; canny, because if you try to simulate the real world, you're always going to get flack on minute levels of detail (e.g., "I am from the country of Mystflx, but why don't you show the iron mines at Qwertyuiop?"), so it's easier to create a game that is representative, but not an explicit simulation. Disappointing, because playing around with a good version of the real world would be interesting.

You can download the demo of Defcon, for Mac, Linux or Windows, and play a limited version of the game for free. You should do that now. What you'll get is a deep strategy experience coupled with a harrowing example of the artistic power of games: the gameplay is itself a poetic expression of the horrors mankind might be capable of, and the personal moral implications involved. You score a point for every million people you kill -- I think that sums it up.