Win, Lose, or Draw

This is what a game looked like when you played it primarily because you couldn't afford Civilization. Win, Lose, or Draw is a strategy game from the eighties where you command one of three possible factions and build your empire on a grid-divided map. The goal is clear — prepare your soldiers, ideally before your opponents, and control as much territory as possible.

It plays as a turn-based strategy on a hexagonal or square grid. Each turn you have limited points to buy units, buildings, and upgrades. The economy isn't complicated here — in classic DOS fashion, you simply wait until what you paid for is deducted, and in exchange you receive what you wanted to buy. The graphics are typically spartan: a map of squares in ivory color, units represented by numbers or letters, text menus with no great ambitions for appearance.

The actual gameplay is fairly comfortable. Your opponents behave reasonably well between your turns, managing their economy, building their army, and seizing opportunities. It's not an intellectual battle — more a game of strength and time. A mandatory element is recruiting or prioritizing prisoners and bribing individual enemy units. That's where the gameplay starts to get a bit livelier, because from the outside you don't know which of your enemy's units wants to be bought.

Today this game tastes like a lecture from a textbook. I don't know if it was great back then, but now you can see that Civilization from the same period blew it out of the water. Win, Lose, or Draw is a case of a game that was a substitute in a limited world of home computers — when you couldn't afford the best, this was good enough. To modern eyes it seems clunky and monotonous.

It's only worth playing as a historical curiosity or if you're interested in what strategy looked like on home PCs back when 640K of memory was considered practically unlimited. It runs without trouble — the MS-DOS environment is no mystery. Otherwise it's more of a museum visit to old digital times than entertainment.