The year is 1881 and I’ve turned the islands of Hawaii into an anarchist paradise that long ago disposed of the king. Our industries are modest, but they are all owned by the workers, giving us one of the highest standards of living in the world. For the most part, we did this without firing a shot.
PLAYED IT
is, even more than its 2011 predecessor, a grand strategy game about shaping a society. Covering the years from 1836 to 1936 on a detailed world map, it models every single individual person alive at the time. That might sound absurd, but it’s not an exaggeration. They’re organised by culture, religion, and profession into groups called ‘pops’ that all get their own 3D portraits, but when you see that there are 4,361 Anglo-Canadian Protestant Machinists in Saskatchewan, that’s not an abstracted figure. The Clausewitz
