Conquest

You move your army across the map, deciding whether to attack a city or wait it out. No English localization, can't find the manual anywhere, but Conquest from the early nineties lets you figure out how it works — just by trying. A strategy game with light RPG elements, probably released by some smaller publisher on floppy disks and then forgotten by time.

It's a turn-based war game. You build an army, move across a world made of those typical grid squares, attack enemy territory and try to win — whether that means conquering all the castles, destroying all enemies or something like that. Units have different strengths and abilities. Maps are either generated or preset, but I can't remember exactly how it worked.

The gameplay itself is a bit slow, the way DOS games used to be. You click here and there, wait for animations that aren't exactly snappy. The menu isn't intuitive — you have to figure out where everything is. But once you get the system, it has its own atmosphere. The turn-based mechanics give you time to think, you're not under pressure. The graphics are pixelated, the music plays for a while and then you stop noticing it. You have various weapons and units available, which forces you to think about your composition.

Conquest never had a chance against Civilization or Masters of Orion, which came out in the same era. It remained a nobody, something someone dug up from old-game catalogs. Today nostalgia doesn't hold it up, because nobody was even playing it back in the nineties. It aged into anonymity — nothing particularly terrible, but nothing you'd remember either.

Try it in your browser if you feel like seeing what strategy looked like when nobody knew what it should look like. It's not a waste of time, but it's not a treasure either. All you really get from it is the feeling that this was just one game among thousands that either made it big or sank into oblivion deservedly.