DETHRONED

I’ve become completely tangled up in Crusader Kings III’s plots and family trees. It’s my jailer, keeping me far too busy orchestrating murders and becoming pen pals with the King of France to leave the flat. I should probably do something about that, but I’ve got this succession crisis to sort out. You know how it is.

Your tools are diplomacy, intrigue, warfare, and luck

There never feels like a good time to step away from Paradox’s grand strategy RPG. It’s One More Crisis Syndrome and I’ve got it bad. Anyone who’s played Crusader Kings II should be familiar with the ailment and well-prepared for the sequel. Once again, you’re the head of an early medieval dynasty, and you’ll try to keep it trucking for as long as you can by click, click, clicking on an elaborate map and a big stack of menus. Your tools are diplomacy, intrigue, warfare, and luck, and your goals are whatever whims your mind conjures up.

Like all grand strategy games, it’s cursed to look incredibly imposing, but this is the friendliest of the bunch. It’s shed none of its complexity, but it’s much better at showing how everything is connected. On top of a serviceable tutorial that gets you started in Ireland, there’s an encyclopaedia and a seemingly infinite supply of tooltips. Even the tooltips have tooltips. Getting advice is like stepping through a portal into a dimension constructed purely out of tips on how to lead a medieval dynasty, which turns