Castles 1+2

A nice Catan-like strategy game (resource management + premodern Europe). It's a shame that Castles II doesn't come with the original Macintosh UI; it's much cleaner and smooth than the DOS one.

I remember firing up these from a DOS shell, and I've kept them and run them for years. (Even to the point of memorizing bits of history to answer the anti-piracy questions in Castles II.) All regarded, the simple, yet sophisticated gameplay afforded by both titles is simply extraordinary. The interface almost never gives me problems. Both games are also fairly difficult into the later levels/harder difficulty levels, but this only really served to make the game more fun! A short review, it's a good set of games.

IIRC, there was a "Northern Expansion" released for Castles 1. Not super-important but for completeness sake it would be nice to have included. Oh well, will probably mostly play the superior Castles 2 anyway :)

Unless they fixed the moat issue with Castles 2, i.e. it didn't slow anything down in the version I had, Castles 1 is better than 2. Found myself actually running away from the castle I built in Castles 2, and then easily retaking it later. I can't think of too many castles I successfully defended in Castles 2. Not helped by the fact that you could only commit 50% of your forces to defense.

I played the heck out of these two games till the floppies actually fell apart. As other reviewers have said, it is deceptively simple and yet you find you will have to try and try again to be able to make sure that you get your castle built before some barbarian horde or greedy lord is after you. The games have hours upon hours of gameplay and no two playthroughs are ever the same. Each decision and each thing that you build will affect everything that is done afterward. These are the games that started all other castle games, IMHO.