There’s a certain type of game I really really like.  It doesn’t have a good category, some games of this type would be called “management,” others would be called “strategy,” but what makes them enjoyable to me is that they’re the types of games where you struggle mightily to do every task the game throws at you, but by the end of the game you have developed systems in which the game basically plays itself.  Let me give some examples.

Factorio is the game that most comes to mind in this.  For Factorio the key word is “automation,” you start the game crash-landing on an alien world and have to hand-mine and hand-craft every single item you’ll need to survive.  Anything you want to build you have to place one by one across the world as well, and so the early game consists of running around mining, crafting, and building hundreds of things by hand.  The goal of the game is to defend yourself from the aliens and launch a rocket ship to escape, but as you progress closer to the rocket everything you want to build or research becomes exponentially more expensive and difficult. 

The trick is that the game gives you systems that you can do to make everything exponentially cheaper and easier.  This biggest game-changer is the ability to create little robots that can perform just about every job for you, and by that point in time the game almost feels like it plays itself.  You can put down big blueprints of what you want to be built and what you want to be crafted and the bots will do everything for you.  Need more resources?  The bots can build mining bases.  Need more science?  The bots can build your labs.  Suddenly everything you had been doing by hand can be done for you and the feeling is just so liberating that I often like to sit back and watch as the bots do everything for me.

The other game that comes to mind is Victoria 2.  Now this game is completely different, it’s not management but more strategy.  Victoria 2 puts you in control of a historical nation starting in 1836 and tells you to guide their destiny from the 19th into the 20th century.  Want to industrialize Japan and become a world power?  You can do that.  What to unite Italy into a single nation?  You can do that.  What to play as France and enact your Napoleonic fantasies?  You do you man, but you can do that. 

The important point is that at the start of the game your nation will normally be poor, illiterate, and un-industrialized, even the nations of Europe were like this in 1836.  This means that there will be tough choices to be made in order to grow your economy, educate your populace, and industrialize your society.  But doing all these things makes the game easier and easier, until by the end of the 19th century you’re likely to be rich, highly educated, and highly industrialized, at which point you can make lots of money even with a fully-funded state apparatus, and capitalists will run around building whatever factory your country needs before you can even ask.  By the end of the game, it is almost playing itself in this way.

I don’t know exactly why I like games like this.  Maybe it’s just about the feeling of liberation you get when something that used to be so hard becomes easy to you, but for whatever reason I really really like games like these and would be happy to be recommended more like them.