A faster kind of empire building
Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim is a turn-based 4X set at the dawn of history, when Bronze Age kings built the first empires. You expand your borders, place cities where they matter, raise armies and fleets, and manage the economy that keeps them going. The design is deliberately trimmed down: the busywork of a classic 4X is stripped out so the decisions that remain are the strategic ones. Combat is abstracted into a Power system rather than tactical battles on the ground, so you only move armies and fleets and let the numbers settle the fight. The result is a game built to be finished in a single sitting.
How your group plays it together
Multiplayer runs on simultaneous turns, so nobody sits waiting for the rest of the table to finish. You take your decisions at the same pace as everyone else, and play well to earn Treasure. Two timing setups are offered: 'live' with short turn timers, and 'asynchronous' with long game timers, which suits a group that can't all be online at once. Random victory conditions keep each match from playing out the same way, and custom victory conditions let your group set up a game that rewards the style of play you want.
Before you start
Each turn presents you with opportunities, but you can take only one: complete the objective and you earn the reward, so the choice of which thread to pull is the core of every turn. There are 8 handmade maps charting Bronze Ages around the world and 52 empires to play, each with traits that give it its own set of challenges. If the game is new to you, a short story campaign about explorer Gertrude Bell teaches the ropes, and after that a difficulty ladder runs against a data-driven AI that does not cheat to compete. A PDF manual is available for the deeper details.