The Sumerian Game

Contrary to what you may think, you have never played The Sumerian Game unless you were a schoolchild in Westchester County, New York in the mid-1960s, because this game was developed by a fourth-grade teacher named Mabel Addis and a programmer named William McKay for a mainframe computer. Two groups of students got a chance to play it, one in 1964 and an expanded one in 1966. A handful of people also got to play it was the BOCES Research Center, and it's from there that the notes used to reconstruct this game derive. The original game cost a fortune to run and was funded by a grant. The gameplay is simple: you need to grow grain to feed your people, seed your fields and store for the future. Disasters are common, but you can also lose grain to rats and rot. If you want your civilization to grow, you have to feed people enough so they can reproduce. But if you feed them too much, you'll have too little available grain to grow and store. Because the game is so rare and has never been playable up until now, it's amazing that we're now able to play it at all thanks to the efforts of HareSoft. There's even a DLC pack that adds in an enhanced remake that includes some of the slides shown to students and trivia questions (both original and new) that periodically perform a knowledge check in the game. Also included are the 1968 Douglas Dyment game King of Sumeria, and the 1974 BASIC game Hamurabi (also known as The Sumer Game) published by David H. Ahl in the 1973 book BASIC Computer Games (by far the most famous version). These versions were based on an idea of what the game was about based on student anecdotes and added in the elements of buying and selling land as well as new settlers arriving. A later version called Santa Paravia added simple graphics and new features. Each of these games are not only the golden oldies of mainframe strategy games (found on systems all over the world), but also only partial replicas of The Sumerian Game itself. But how do these games play? First of all, they're extremely difficult and require some serious trial and error to get going. I killed my civilizations many times before I got them prospering. The key is to be very generous with your food starting out and find the sweet spot between satisfactory and starving. You also need to pray that the gods don't want you to fail, because disaster will strike and it takes careful planning to prepare for it. Second, these games are very simple, much like many early mainframe games that allow you to input short commands and then run a simulation based on your input. They're still a lot of fun - there are even trophies to earn! - but they're definitely a product of their time. Even so, I'm delighted to have them all available in a free-to-play package and encourage players to purchase the DLC to support HareSoft's efforts. This is game preservation at its best!