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20. Sid Meier's Colonization
Created by MicroProse
Release year: 1994
Platform: DOS
Guesstimated playtime: 220 hrs

I played a lot of the original Civilization. A lot. (List spoilers!) Sid Meier and company clearly recognized the hit they had, so they set out to make an un-sequel. Two years later, they'd just straight-up make Civilization 2, but first they decided to go in a different direction and created Colonization, which was a look at four European powers bringing settlers to the new world to establish a set of colonies that would eventually declare independence and become their own nation.

If you like Civ 1, you'll both feel right at home with Colonization, and extremely uncomfortable. Thanks to a late-stage design change, the colonies have a smaller radius than cities in Civ 1. Working the land costs resources that are in short supply early on. Every point of population is represented by an actual colonist, some of whom are specialists in their trade and each of whom need to be assigned a task. At first your focus is on food and carpentry to construct a few key buildings, but later on your colonies can flourish with colleges, factories, and shipyards.

The land you're trying to occupy is also already inhabited by natives. You have a decision whether to try to co-exist with the Indians, conquer them, or do your best to avoid them. Ultimately, the game plays very differently to Civ because even though you need a military after a fashion, you also don't need to do any real fighting if you handle things well...until you declare independence, which is the main goal of the game. Once you've built yourself up enough, you go to war with the motherland, and they dispatch a crap ton of soldiers you have to endure. Their forces are stronger than anything you could have, so you truly have to weather them with numbers.

Aside from the fact that some might view the topic as problematic today, the game was an interesting board game-esque TBS that only shares a few systems with Civ 1, and really stands alone as its own entity. I first got Colonization from some kid at camp who, for reasons unknown, decided to share his whole software collection with me. There wasn't much there that I found of value, but I snagged Colonization and still consider returning to it every once in a great while for nostalgia reasons. I tended to fall into certain traps, and wasn't fond of trying to rack up soldiers to clear out the natives or whatever -- I usually ended up playing as England because they got colonists faster and I just wanted to build up my "cities." That also meant that once it came time to declare independence, I lost interest. The endgame condition for the game was a little weird, and often very counter to playstyle. But one important source for resources was selling your products back to the motherland, and they would gradually lower the prices on your chief exports over time, so that eventually became unsustainable. There were a lot of little fun things that could happen, though, like discovering the Fountain of Youth, and the equivalent of the tech tree was recruiting founding fathers to provide passive bonuses, where I got to learn about a number of prominent figures in the Colonial Era that I hadn't heard of elsewhere.

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Up next: Two games fused together.