I am, as is well-known, an absolute sicko for any videogame that lets me conjure up some fabulous alternate history. Crusader Kings: what if Novgorod conquered Muscovy? Europa Universalis: what if Ethiopia became the beating, imperial heart of the world economy? Hearts of Iron 4: what if any of WW2's key players were replaced by someone only loosely aware of what a tank is (I am not good at Hearts of Iron 4)?

But the king of the alt-history genre isn't Paradox. Not for me, anyway. It's the ramshackle assortment of socialism sims made by Nostalgames , whose main stock-in-trade is political sims that put you in charge of historical communist states—the USSR, China, the DDR, and so on—at moments of crisis. Of which there were many.

I've actually written one of those before— China: Mao's Leg

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