Your Daily World-Conquest Fix

Aevum Obscurum is an online-only multiplayer game of world conquest. Played on a map of Europe (though other maps can be downloaded and used), each player starts with a single province, a small army, and a treasury. Your ultimate goal is to become the dominant power, controlling much of the map.

Online only? Yes; its primarily a multiplayer game, with up to 50 players possible in a single instance. You play your moves, send them to the server--and when all players moves are in (or the deadline hits), the sever resolves players orders. You then view what happened last turn, and plan your moves for the next. Games can be started either in long-term or "blitz" mode; in blitz mode, turns update every few minutes, while in long-term mode, they update every day or so.

The Risks of American History

American History Lux, like Sillysoft's Lux Delux, uses the rules of Risk. But in this case, you play through a series of maps representing American wars (from the French and Indian War through the Iraq War), with armies and geography that shape the experience into a reasonable recreation of those wars. Not an intensive simulation, in other words, but something that does give a cool sense of historial progression. Before each level begins, you're presented with a little bit of information about the war (and a link to Wikipedia if you want to know more).

Risk In the Ancient World

From developers Sillysoft comes a new installment in their series of history-related Risk-like games. In Ancient Empires Lux, the first scenario starts in ancient Sumeria, and the last with the Roman empire; in between are the Indus Valley civilizations, the Babylonian empire, China under the Zhou (and later under the Han), the Greek city states, the rise of the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, and the Maurya in India.

In each scenario, you can play as any of the contending powers--with the interesting twist that since there's generally one power set up as more likely to win, you earn more points playing as one of the less powerful contenders.

Deep, detailed simulation? Well, no; this is a Risk-like game, after all. But it's colorful, there is a sense of history, and kids, at least, may learn something from it.

Not infrequently, you run into somebody posting about whether or not open-source development can possibly work for games, and usually concluding that it can't. Very likely the poster has played NetHack, but I guess Rogue-likes don't count. But. What about Battle for Wesnoth?

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based fantasy game in which you control a set of heroes and armies, building up over time to defeat AI-controlled opponents. A slew of campaign and scenarios in the game itself provide probably hundreds of hours of gameplay, but an active community provides innumerable new mods and campaigns you can download. It's been localized for something like 20 languages, and ported to just about every viable OS still in active use. And it is, of course, utterly free, both in the "free like beer" and "free like freedom" senses; the source code is open and available.

Original, Abstract, Naval Combat

So... Battleship Chess. The destroyers move like rooks, right?

Well, no; don't take the name so literally. Like Chess, this is a turn-based abstract strategy game with surprising depth. Like Battleship, its theme is naval combat. But the gameplay is quite unlike those two games.

Each turn, you may move one (and only one) ship in your fleet, which may then fire; if it ends its move adjacent to a friendly ship, both (or all) ships may fire, so planning your moves to maximize your firepower is useful. Different ship types (battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers, and subs) have different movement ranges, armor ratings--and armaments. As you might expect, battleships have huge long-range guns, while destroyers have shorter-range but potentially devastating torpedoes. Actually, the ship stats are quite detailed, almost as if this were a naval sim, which it patently is not.

There's fog of war, meaning you don't see enemy ships until they get within sight range--you are not, as in Battleship required to fire blindly until you hit something. You can certainly do that, as many ships can fire farther than their sight range, but ships also have limited ammunition, so there's a tradeoff involved.

Return of the Beloved Amiga Classic

Largely a remake of the much-loved Amiga game Defender of the Crown (later released for just about every platform available in the late 80s, including the NES), Heroes Live Forever updates the game with better graphics, fully digitized music, and a new gameplay element ("tactics" cards that give you special benefits during battles).

In Defender of the Crown, you play one of several great lords in England, attempting to unify the realm under your own rule. Conquering provinces produces tax revenues that you can use to increase the size of your army (but you have only one "army" which follows you, milord, about, and can purchase new units only at your castle, meaning you become vulnerable over time unless you return home frequently).

Empires & Dungeons is a simple turn-based fantasy game in which you build armies and conquer the territories of AI-controlled opponents. Unlike most turn-based fantasy games, it includes a Rogue-like "dungeon-crawling" aspect (but with graphics), and exploring the dungeons is important for levelling up your hero and gaining honor points, which are necessary to construct some buildings and build some units. Graphics are somewhat retro 2D tiles, but there's a lot of gameplay here for the price.

Your Once-A-Day 4X Fix

Galactic Emperor: Hegemony is a multiplayer "4X" (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) game played via a web interface, with one turn update per day. The basic rules behind the game are simple--each player starts with a single star-system surrounded by 'neutral' ones, and the early game is a matter of expansion until you contact your opponents (usually 12 players in a game). Systems produce resources, which you use to build factories (which produce ships), improve your technology, and purchase a few special units. Ultimately, the player who controls the most systems wins.

Excellent Total-Conversion Mod for Jagged Alliance 2

Urban Chaos is a first-rate mod for Jagged Alliance 2--and if you like that game and have played it through, what's not to like about essentially getting a whole new campaign to play for free?

None Dare Call it XCOM

...Because that's a trademark owned by Atari. But Laser Squad Nemesis is the true intellectual and gameplay heir of XCOM: UFO Defense (published in Europe as UFO: Enemy Unknown), the best-selling and best-loved computer game of 1995. No surprise there; Julian and Nick Gollop developed both games. But as is typical in this industry, they signed away all IP to get XCOM published.