Fate of the World

I recently found a computer game called Fate of the World. The premise of the game is to make decisions that guide the world from the year 2020 to 2200 while meeting various objectives. For example, one objective that is common is to reach the year 2200 without having the global temperature rise more than three degrees above the year 1750’s temperature (1750 being the start of industrialization according to the game). Another common objective is to raise the human development index (HDI) in different parts of the world; this can be done through expanding their education system, giving them better access to medicine or improving their infrastructure.  The game has you balance these objectives with the needs of the people in the game; they need food to eat, coal to power there industry and oil to drive their cars. Each of the aforementioned things helped raise the global temperature (food production not as much), so you have to maintain a balance of preventing global warming while accommodating the peoples other needs. To address the needs and wants, as well as global warming, the player is given a budget every turn, which they use to provide the wants and needs and implement policies that are used to combat global warming. The game is broken into turns of five years (36 turns total) each to allow the player to react to new situations and remove policies that don’t appear to be working. The world itself is broken down into various regions, each with their own wants and needs, so you can have a place like India who starts the game wanting improved medicine while North America wants more oil. This makes the balancing act even more difficult since each region is only given so many slots to fit their wants and needs, and the region will kick you out of it if you are not meeting their needs.

In my experience Fate of the World is a challenging game. Keeping all of the needs of the people met while combating global warming can be quite difficult because the needs are always changing; so one turn the people in Russia may need oil and the next they may want better crop yields. This adds a new level of difficulty since you will have instances of many regions wanting similar things that you can’t provide to all, because of either funding issues or because there is not much of what they want. I will admit that there is a bit of a learning curve, and it can be slow at first, since Fate of the World is a turn based card game at its root. Once you get into it in however, the game is lots of fun and challenging. There is even a mode where the game switches your role from the goodie goodie savior of the world to that of a James Bond villain. Here the game has you working to raise the global temperature, kill off endangered animals or even try and make humans extinct.  Overall, I would say if you have a chance take a look at Fate of the World, it is a solid strategy game that is loads of fun that is quite challenging once you get the feel of it.