The best historical games

Berlin 1948 throws you into post-war Germany as a secret agent on a noir-flavored mission through a city drenched in trench coats and suspicion. It’s one part spy thriller, o...

1893: A World's Fair Mystery is an interactive fiction game developed by the American studio Illuminated Lantern and released in 2002. Set during the Chicago World's Columbian Expo...

American Conquest is the kind of game that throws hundreds of little soldiers at you and says, "Good luck, General!" Set during the early colonization of the Americas, this RTS ble...

Civil War buffs, rejoice. Battle of Antietam (1985) lets you relive one of the bloodiest days in American history... via pixelated dots and turn-based tension. There’s no fla...

Great Napoleonic Battles is the kind of game that assumes you are ready to command armies and possibly rewrite history before breakfast. In Great Napoleonic Battles, strategy is ev...

Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition is an educational computer game released in 1992 by Broderbund Software. It's part of the popular Carmen Sandiego franchise, des...

Galleons of Glory invites players to sail the high seas in search of fame, fortune, and possibly a few cannonballs heading directly toward their ship. Naval combat games from this ...

Ever dreamed of running a transatlantic zeppelin empire during the golden age of flight? Zeppelin: Giants of the Sky lets you do just that — and it’s every bit as niche...

By 1992, Vol. 3 wrapped up the trilogy with even more complex scenarios. At this point, the series had become less of a game and more of an interactive textbook—though that&r...

Bigger, deeper, and just as punishing, Gengis Khan 2: Clan of the Gray Wolf (1992) expands the formula with more maps, more rulers, and more ways to fail spectacularly. Want to uni...

Do you enjoy betrayal, backstabbing, and pretending to be a global power while actually being terrible at geography? Computer Diplomacy is the digital version of the classic board ...

In Search and Destroy (1988), you’re a helicopter pilot with one job: blow things up. It’s as straightforward as the title suggests, yet endlessly satisfying. With top-...

Released in 1993, Hannibal is a strategy game that asks you to think like a military commander facing impossible odds—and occasionally impossible interface decisions. Inspire...

In Taipan for Windows, you’re not a hero, you’re a 19th-century capitalist trying to get rich trading tea, silk, and the occasional bit of opium in the South China Sea....

In 1990, strategy games were still figuring out how serious they wanted to be, and Frontline sits comfortably in that experimental phase. This DOS title drops players into a tactic...

Guardians of Infinity: to Save Kennedy is the sort of time-travel adventure that casually suggests you might want to prevent one of the most infamous assassinations in history befo...

If Shakespeare wrote video games and then decided, “You know what this needs? A parser and some pixelated drama,” you'd get Avon. In this interactive fiction gem from 1...