Tamper

Tamper is a stock-market game for DOS from 1988, and the title is the whole joke. To tamper is to meddle, and meddling is a legitimate strategy here. You trade shares, watch new companies appear, grow and get swallowed by rivals, and buy into whatever you expect to rise. But for the right price you can also reach in and push the prices around yourself.

Structurally it is a crossbreed of a board game and a market simulator. The board is drawn in an isometric view, your position on it determines which companies you can expand and which you can take over, and share trading runs on top of all that. It is the combination that makes Tamper more than a dry table of numbers: prices are not an anonymous curve but a consequence of where the pieces stand and what somebody just got away with.

Up to four players can take part, and the game comes alive that way. Against the computer it is a decent optimisation exercise, but with four people at the keyboard the manipulation becomes a social event, because everyone knows the others are doing it too and nobody knows when or to whom. The pace is slow and deliberate, closer to Monopoly than to anything with reflexes in it.

The weakness is presentation. The interface comes from an era when nobody worried about ergonomics, and working out what each screen wants from you is a small maze of its own. The game also has no dramatic shape; it is not heading anywhere, it simply runs until you agree to stop. If you like economic games and can tolerate a first hour of groping around, though, there is an idea here you will hardly find anywhere else.

You can start Tamper on oldgame.cz right in the browser, with no DOS setup.