Play European History Online

European History on MS-DOS was one of those games that looked simple at first glance—just a map of Europe and some menus—but sucked you in for hours once you started playing. You pick a nation, and suddenly you're sweating over whether to invest in cannons or butter up the French with a trade deal. The diplomacy system actually made sense, which was rare for strategy games back then.

What I loved was how unpredictable it felt. One minute you're peacefully building universities, the next Austria declares war over some tiny border dispute you forgot about. The economic side was surprisingly deep too—mess up your grain supply, and good luck keeping your armies fed. Yeah, the graphics were basically colored ASCII art, but that just meant your imagination did the heavy lifting.

Still holds up if you can handle the old-school keyboard controls. Just don't blame me when you lose track of time trying to finally unite Italy under your rule.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".