What we've been playing

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: plagues, vikings and ancient cities.

If you'd asked me a week ago to give you the whats and wheres and whens of ancient Mesopotamia, my history-deficient brain wouldn't have had much of a clue. Now, though, thanks to Nepos Games' engrossing old-school city builder, Nebuchadnezzar, I feel like I've an entire history lesson's worth of facts and figures with which to regale you.

That surprising bounty of actual historical context is just one of Nebuchadnezzar's lovely touches, niftily informing the structure and difficulty curve of its main campaign so your Mesopotamian city's rise from a couple of huts to a sprawling metropolis unfolds through the gradual introduction of chronologically correct new buildings and other mechanical complexities. You're essentially discovering new stuff at the same time your city's founders would have done in their own historical timeline.

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