About a week ago I came across the game of my dreams, and I mean this literally. As a child, I played a lot of Koei simulation games like Nobunga’s Ambition or Genghis Khan II: Clan Of The Grey Wolf, where the player in a given historical scenario played a particular historically accurate leader and then sought to take over an entire country, or even continent, while controlling the economy and dealing with revolts and intrigue. This sort of grand strategy game has long appealed to me, to the point where I have even had dreams where I was playing multiplayer games like this with other people I knew as a way of testing strategic prowess, with occasional real-life consequences. At any rate, this game reminds me a lot of those games, only being more advanced in many ways, and a lot more complicated to boot.

This game is a major time sink. I wanted to wait until I had finished an entire game with my first family, the Von Tyrol family of Tirol, small and loyal counts of the Holy Roman Empire, but after more than 20 hours of gameplay, the game time had only gone forward a little over a hundred years and several generations of the prolific family, intermarried into all kinds of baronies and royal houses, giving their children away to nomadic Alans living east of the Black Sea, unfortunate early-dying Spanish kings whose territories are taken over by their bloodthirsty cousins, petty Scottish infant queens seeking to resist English domination, along with several members of the ruling German imperial house, the little-known Bilungs, with a few Arpads and other houses thrown in for good measure. Even when no decisions have to be made by the character about knights or thieves or flirtatious courtiers or relatives with murderous plots, there is usually something going on in the game, like the Third Holy Roman Civil War, or a massive revival of the Byzantine Empire, or a Muslim takeover of southern Italy. Even having the game play in one’s sleep does not help because one wakes up trying to decide what to name the child of your second cousin, whose parents you barely remember from three hours ago when they married.

It is said that video games are an escape from reality, but this game is not so much an escape as a crystallization of the problems of life. One faces the difficulty of holding one’s position, the fact that neither intrigue nor violence presents an easy or a straightforward way of improving, that every decision made has some kind of opportunity costs, and that the most difficult and important parts of life are marrying well and raising good family. Over and over again one sees notes relating to marital woes, or relatives who are the fifth in line for succession to one of the family’s petty baronies complaining about not having a wife. As empathetic as I am to the problems of my fictional relatives, it is simply not that easy to find suitable spouses for large families with complicated relational ties, especially because unless one marries children young, one can only find spouses within one’s court, and most of those people are close relatives anyway, or the children of other noble houses being educated by my rather well-educated clan, many of whom appear to be dying of stress. No, this game is not an escape from the problems of life, but a reminder that a good game helps to distill the problems of life where they have a possibility of being solved successfully, unlike the problems of our real life.

As is often the case in contemporary games, Crusader Kings offers a wide variety of downloadable content at an extra cost. Some of these appear to be worth checking out, though I have yet to do so while I attempt to master the basic game. While I am not interested in the ahistorical Aztec Sunset Invasion scenario, some of the scenarios, like the Sword of Islam, Rajas of India, Charlemagne, the Republic, and the Old Gods increase playing game (hardly necessary, but always fun), expand the map into Africa and Asia, and allow for more playable peoples. Others like The Sons of Abraham and Way Of Life increase the options for religious and roleplaying purposes, and a ruler designer allows one to create a ruler of the Middle Ages in one’s own image. Besides this, there are unit packs and musical soundtracks to increase the variety of the look and sound of the game, which is appreciated if one fails to turn off the computer’s sound while it plays the same soundtrack over and over again. This is a game likely to be enjoyed for some time. Eventually I may even play it online with other players, if I can ever get my military units to work the way I want them, and furthermore this seems like a game that will be enjoyed and played for years, which may eventually allow it to pay back its cost and the cost of its expansions.