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.

Detailed, Well-Researched Game of the American Revolution

Birth of America is a big, sprawling wargame of the American Revolution and the French and Indian Wars, with a map covering the whole eastern portion of the North American continent (including Quebec, and up to the Mississippi). Though strategic in its approach, you play at an operational level, ordering individual regiments on a detailed map of the area. Although it's turn-based, enemy units move and fight at the same time as yours, so unlike many turn-based games, there's a real sense of the fluidity of combat. (Or to put it another way, it's not an "I go, you go" game--rather, both you and the AI plan your moves, and then you watch as the results of those plans play out.)

4000 years ago in the Cradle of Civilization, mighty Empires fought for water, resources and the arable land in the Fertile Crescent. Play as the Egyptians, the Babylonians, screaming Nubian warriors, or the Assyrians. Develop your country by producing commodities and selling them to your neighbors. Raise glorious armies and wage wars of conquest. Roll over the plains and seek victory in Chariots of War!

Squad-Level Eastern Front Combat

Despite the name, this is not a strategic Eastern Front game, but one at a tactical level: individual soldiers, tanks, and vehicles are modelled, with infantry ordered at the level of several-man groups, or by issuing orders to a squad as a whole. Hailed as one of the greatest wargames ever published, it received multiple game-of-the-year awards from the industry press.

It's quite a large game; the demo may only be 60 MB, but the full game clocks in at over a gig, because thousands of different unit types are modelled. Some 70 scenarios (most playable in an hour or less) simulate small-unit actions in terrain resembling that across the Eastern Front, from Romania to Finland--and units of the Axis minor allies, as well as the Germans and Russians, are included.

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).

Turn-Based Fantasy Goodness

Once upon a time, and not that long ago, games like Disciples II or Heroes of Might and Magic were mainstays of the industry, being featured and lauded by game magazines and loved by huge numbers of gamers. Termed "turn-based fantasy" games, they featured a tasty combination of exploration, construction, and combat, with a bit of story thrown in.