The year is 1836, and the machinery of the Industrial Revolution is on a roll. The century to come will transform the face of the human world, with a population explosion, a second industrial revolution, etc. In Victoria 3 (open in new tab), you will ride this explosive wave of change and take control of a society that is coming to an end in 1936. What you do in the process, and how much fun you have, is up to you.

In Victoria 3, you will build a nation by shaping its laws, economy, people and institutions. The developers of Paradox call this a "social construction game." It asks us to take an interest in the minutiae of political developments, the distribution of power, population trends, economic organization, factory output, world trade, and so on, and to begin to manipulate them.

That can be difficult. Victoria 3 boasts some of the most complex game mechanics I have ever seen in a strategy game. It can be overwhelming. You can manage trade routes in great detail, chart a course for social reform, fine-tune your nation's construction cues, and examine production methods. Even a small country is always given options to tinker with, and a large country's progress can slow to a crawl as it scrambles between trade crises and multi-front wars.

This management is facilitated by one of Paradox's better user interfaces, not as friendly as Crusader Kings 3, but with considerably more complex systems. The bottom bar is particularly useful, providing shortcuts to all sorts of state actions, from building and diplomacy to mustering troops. The maps, on the other hand, are impressive and detailed, with little trains running, mines running across the terrain, and little soldiers shooting up the battlefield. Where [Victoria 3] excels most is in its simulation of how society is governed, which draws you deeper and deeper into the game. The government is based on laws, with options covering a variety of topics, including how the economy works and voting rights. Changing laws requires the support of interest groups, the best mechanic in Victoria 3. These groups, such as landowners, the petit bourgeoisie, the military, labor unions, businessmen, religious authorities, and rural folk, gather influence from their members and form dynamic political parties to push their agenda.

These groups intersect brilliantly with all other game systems, creating opportunities and obstacles. For example, you may want to change the tax code to fix your finances, but powerful industrialists will wreak havoc and may team up with another group to start a revolution. So, you change the voting laws to give power to the poor and weaken the political influence of the industrialists. Of course, this would mean that another group could be created that could push their agenda.

The interest groups also have leaders, and while it is unfortunate that we cannot interact with them directly, they have a nice portrait and can be disruptive and effective. Playing as a Grand Colombian, I made a communist a strong military leader. The normally conservative military, together with the trade unions, formed a new socialist party and began to advocate social reforms. Reforms that would anger the powerful Conservative Party, run by the Catholic Church and the landowners.

Surprisingly, domestic politics seems to have little effect on international relations. Your world socialist vanguard state can become best friends with Her Majesty's oppressive empire with little internal or external opposition. This may seem like cutthroat realpolitik, but in action it feels like a lackluster system.

At the core of all these interest groups is the human being, also known as pop. Every person on the planet is simulated in the background. They have jobs, families, and desire various necessities and luxuries. They move around and operate in a system that is supremely fascinating just to watch them in action. When ideologies like socialism and fascism are invented, pop groups gain new supporters and targets, causing unrest and revolution at home and abroad.

Your major concerns with pop groups are their standard of living, cultural discrimination, and employment, but trying to improve them solves a big social and political puzzle. Giving religious freedom and citizenship to immigrants is a thorny but unavoidable balancing act, as it improves their lives while angering others.

Of course, like many other systems in Victoria 3, it can produce strange results. A pop-up pops up to say that Oregon is being populated by a large population of people of Lacustrine Bantu descent. Could thousands of people be migrating so reliably and so rapidly from the other side of the world, from an undeveloped, landlocked country?

As well as managing a nation's people, your hands are also at the helm of trade and industry. In Victoria 3, you act as a sort of omniscient chief executive, deciding to build new factories, mines, infrastructure, and farms. Of course, you need money to do this, but you make these decisions, whether it comes from wealthy investors or from the state itself.

The Victoria 3 economic system is a clever simulation that incentivizes real-world behavior. You do not always want to hoard wealth. You can run deficits for a few years and build up your reserves, or you can continue austerity for years after a world war drives you to the brink of bankruptcy. It can also look abroad and start exploiting the least developed countries when they are short of vital supplies.

Planning one's own economy and finding out what commodities are needed for industrialization and where to get what raw materials from is the dream of economic strategy. The complexity of determining production methods and ownership is just the icing on the cake of a customizable home market.

In contrast to deftly tracking every single bushel of wheat, Victoria 3 provides clarity by making the supply of materials unrealistically limitless while eventually hitting a very, very expensive price ceiling or becoming so cheap that the market hits the floor. It also provides feedback to let you know when a trade route goes into negative balance.

The intersection of business and state quickly becomes a colonialist machine that eats people and spits out bones. People wage wars of conquest over rubber to get bicycle tires, or budding socialist utopias play world police to prevent other countries from doing the same.

Eventually, of course, we will have to deal with conflicts at home and abroad. However, these conflicts are not always by force of arms, but often across the negotiating table. This is perhaps the weakest part of "Victoria 3," and only a few key systems keep "Victoria 3" from being a complete dud.

Armies are managed in the abstract, and armies are run by generals assigned to the front lines. You can tell your army to hold the line or to advance and occupy territory. From the politician's chair, at least, this is a simulation quite appropriate for 19th century warfare. Because the army you create, the equipment you build, and the commander you choose will hopefully bring you victory.

Your set of diplomatic options is simple. To do most things, you make a diplomatic play: you claim a state controlled by another as your own, you demand that other countries submit to you as a puppet government, you force other countries to adopt certain laws. You make demands, the other side makes counter demands, and outside countries either remain neutral or are bribed to choose sides. You assemble and deploy troops to sound the saber. If no one folds before the timer runs out, it means war.

This is a tidy system, but the diplomatic behavior around it is poor and hard to do for one reason: when it comes to international relations, AI is static at best and unpredictable at worst. It can remain friendly for decades, or it can turn into a hateful rival overnight. Whether this is due to bugs or unseen changes in other countries is not certain.

A small country without a large army can get caught in an endless civil war, rendering chunks of the map unusable unless it declares war and ends it itself. A large country, like your country, has a rich inner life, but lacks the guiding hand of someone who is moving toward a larger goal.

It is exacerbated by the short memory of AI. When I entered the game as a Socialist United States Syndicate, I helped empower all the communist revolutions around the world. Less than a month after my victory, the newly fraternal nations judged me to be an existential threat and often imposed massive penalties on their relations with me.

But that was the exception. If anything, the countries of Victoria 3 have been reluctant to enter into diplomatic agreements, and even more reluctant to start wars. We have never seen anything resembling a major conflict like the Franco-Prussian War or the Crimean War, let alone an international conflict like the First World War.

Victoria 3 is weak in the international arena, but if your fantasy is to take control of a nation, set your own goals, build your own society, and play with a complex interlocking system, it will fulfill them admirably. Your nation's internal affairs are rich, and for the majority of the game, you will be up to your neck in internal politics.