Pharaoh + Cleopatra

I've loved this game forever. The music is wonderful, the strategy aspects are great, building monuments is challenging but fun, the gods are a great addition to daily life (throw festivals to Bast whenever you can, because once she favors you, she'll throw a festival for all the other gods to show them that you're awesome and it saves you $ in the end!)... basically this is just a really well-made game and it's really stood up well to the test of time. Highly, HIGHLY recommend!

Probably my favorite city building game of all time even now after fifteen years. I played this when it came out. I was eleven at the time. I played a lot of games at that age but the one game that truly stuck with me was this game. Pharaoh filled me with a sense of wonder for the ancient world. It probably made me somewhat of a dork too when I kept reiterating the missions and mission briefings as facts to other people back then. Classmates dreamed of being Astronauts or Firemen, I dreamed of being a Historian or an Archeologist...until the real world slapped me with the reality of bills. But that's how strongly this game affected me that even now, fifteen years later, I still spend a few hours of my free time reading up on world history, ancient mythologies or the latest discoveries on ancient civilizations as a hobby. Having owned and played the other games of the series: Caesar, Zeus and Emperor. I still consider Pharaoh to be the best. Now that I think about it, the game's still installed on my Pentium III computer I put in storage years ago...

I spent many countless hours on this game back in the days when dial-up was still rulling the internet and getting a smooth connection was the luck of the draw and your service provider (who shall not be named but which looks similar to awol, hint hint). I loved it when my huts would get their resources and grow automatically or decline due to a lack of recourses. It really makes you plan ahead where to put your settlement! Like someone else said the atmosphere in this game is very warm and calming so you barely see the hours fly by. The next thing you know it's already time for dinner! Now I just have to find that copy of my game again and rev this baby up.

It is precisely those special "walker" dynamics and building placement rules and effects that make this game one of the best city builder gems in the whole wide world. It is almost impossible to overstate in describing the overwhelming feeling of thrill and reward when your houses evolve into palaces and you manage to have a working infrastructure that supports high standards of wealth for your people... which is a quite difficult thing to achieve, especially when ressources are somewhat limited and your population ages. By the way, the last mentioned mechanism is not a pain in the ass, as some critics tend to claim, it is a brilliant and realistic touch to controlling your cities population over generations. This game represents true greatness in game development and almost no other game in this category has aged that well, that's for sure.

I've owned the physical copies of this, Zeus& Poseidon, Caesar II and III since I bought them all around 2002 in a package deal I found at Walmart. I still play them. Caesar III drives me nuts as I've never loved the mechanics of it. Still love to play Caesar II on occasion. Currently replaying Pharaoh/Cleopatra for probably the 30th time now. Never gets dull. Once I finish it again I will replay Zeus/Poseidon. Most cost effective games I ever bought considering I've got 20 years of use out of them!! And they're like the new mobile games without the dang drama :) I will never not tell someone to play these, they are wonderful games and I wish there were new versions, but you really can't compete with a classic. I'd love if they were remastered though. That would be...oh...totally divine!