Government manager game

Start your own Animation Studio in the birth stages of the industry! Run your very own lemonade stand! Can you keep all your customers satisfied while making a profit?

Cats are assholes. Deepnight Games. Store Galore. Manage your tiny shop to pay off your giant loan! Simpocalypse is a post-apocalyptic civilization simulator, where you manage your settlement to become a global empire!

BTC King. Do you have what it takes to be the BTC King? Challenge yourself in this semi-text based game!

Solar Colonies. Tame the unstable climates of barren and inhabitable planets, then colonize them! Hire the finest robbers. Upgrade your crew. Plan your heist. Farmstead Story. Early Bird Press. Democracy 3. The Political Machine Crusader Kings II. Laws of Civilization. Jennifer Government: NationStates. Tropico 3. SuperPower 2.

Crisis in the Kremlin. Balance of Power. Shadow President. Supremacy Commander in Chief. Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator. The Political Machine. The stats and data on players are accurate enough that pro coaches have reportedly used it, and everyone with a fondness for the beautiful game is susceptible to its charms.

Developer Sports Interactive first found success with the Championship Manager series before splitting with publisher Eidos. The latest Football Manager is easily the most complete management simulation around, but it can become all-consuming.

I am a Rimworld addict. Sometimes it stops me from trying other games because anything vaguely reminiscent just makes me want to play Rimworld. It combines the challenge of resource management and colony building on random alien planets with colorful characters and emergent stories. Still, nothing nails the chaos of sci-fi colony-building like Rimworld. Movie tie-ins are rarely successful, but the Jurassic Park series has long cried out for a good theme park sim.

Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis was fun, but the rebooted franchise needed a park-building game of its own. The original Jurassic World Evolution featured more than 40 dinosaurs and challenged you to build and manage parks across five different islands. This sequel stirs flying and marine reptiles into the mix, taking the total number of dino species to 75, and offers a short campaign, a fun new chaos mode, and some other improvements. Scouring the globe for fossils, you must nail DNA sequences to recreate extinct species.

We know building a dinosaur park inevitably ends with someone getting eaten, but the disasters here take many forms, and the option to jump into third-person and observe dinosaurs up close adds a lot to the experience.

Species have different environmental needs and genetic problems to overcome. All are beautifully animated and will keep you on your toes as you strive to keep them and your guests alive. It may be a few years old, but this is still the reigning champion of city builders after the SimCity series fell into disrepair.

The basic format of creating residential, industrial, and commercial zones and building roads and providing services will be familiar to SimCity players, but some intriguing city management options pop up as your city grows. Distilling the satisfying challenge of gathering resources and automating processes to turn them into increasingly complex machines, Factorio is frighteningly addictive. The drive to constantly research and refine as you optimize your factory and balance defenses to cope with increasingly tough aliens is incredibly engrossing.

The best games always inspire others, and Factorio fans must also try Dyson Sphere Program , an early-access game that takes factory building interstellar. Beavers have inherited the earth, and Timberborn tasks you with organizing them to construct a smoothly running colony. The slow growth from a handful of drones laying cables in the dust up to a thriving society of colonists is immensely satisfying, and the hostile environment and starkly limited resources means it feels like so much more an achievement than simply ordering some serfs to go build you a mansion by the river.

By twinning management sim tradition with a survival mentality - your colonists need air, water and heat as well as food, and woe betide you if you fail to provide them - what could have been an old-fashioned building game becomes a thoroughly modern one. Most management games are about indulging yourself as opposed to providing a real challenge. They're about an ever-widening circle of building possibility - the more hours you put in, the more things open up. Frostpunk is different.

Frostpunk's interest is in starkly limiting what options are available to you, to the point where you're frequently making some absolutely crushing decisions about what you have to sacrifice in order to gain or fix something else. Set during a sort of steampunk post-apocalypse, you're tasked with keeping a handful of shivering, starving refugees of a new ice age alive. There are barely any resources, and anyone who does not live close to the life-giving heat generators won't last long.

Sickness is inevitable. But you need the workers to bring in fuel and food to keep everyone else alive. Do you let the ill heal - or do you amputate? What about children?

More hands on deck, or is having a childhood more important? Frostpunk is management on the edge, where almost every decision you take - almost every building you erect - is a huge risk. It can be mastered in time, but until then, it is desperate, harrowing and a deft inversion of the usual race-to-riches approach. Theme Hospital might be the first popular management game to dwell on the dark side of profiteering, but Prison Architect is an even darker proposition. Can you keep your inmates happy?

Can you make a profit? How important is it to process death row residents efficiently? What happens when a riot breaks out? The brilliance of Introversion's game is in its recognition that a prison is a series of systems - of housing and treatment, of security and recreation - and then in its application of sturdy simulations to each of those systems.

Like the best management games, it allows you to create a smoothly running machine, but it also embraces chaos and roleplaying. During the most intricate planning, you can forget what the theme implies about the resources you're processing, but Prison Architect is only ever a moment away from reminding you of the humanity within the machine.

Honestly, throw a rock in the air and just play whichever Tropico game it lands on - they're all a solid good time and they're all based around the exact same concept: you're the comedy dictator of an initially poor island nation, attempting to transform it into a land of tourist'n'trade riches while ruling with an at least partially iron fist. A great many of the complexities of, say, a Sim City are discarded - there's no real worrying about powerlines or water supplies, and instead you get on with the business of plopping down buildings, with the twin goals of making it all look lively and attractive and generating ever-more filthy lucre.

This is more of a toy box to rummage in than it is a strategic puzzle, but it has an extra layer of mild moral dilemmas that keep you hooked. For instance, the exile or death of troublemakers, bribing protesters, ignoring environmental concerns, rigging elections or cramming people into dangerous housing.

Or you could stay the course, do the right thing and hope that it will all come good in the end. Tropico 6 also finally adds some much-needed spice to this most conservative of management series by stretching out your latest empire across an entire archipelago of islands, switching your traditional goal of expansion for expansion's sake to something you're actively striving towards.

It's a small change, sure, but as that old saying goes, even the smallest change can make a profound difference. Banished is a different sort of a management game. At first glance, it looks a lot like a Settlers or Anno - good-natured, brakes-on building and tree-chopping, enjoying the gradual and all-but-inevitable expansion from scruffy one-horse town to bustling old world metropolis.

But no. Banished is about scratching out a rudimentary life in the dirt and cold, and maintaining that life even as the elements turn against you - striving to subsist rather than to explode into glory. If approached wanting a cheery city-builder, you're going to have a horrible time. If approached as a sterling test of planning and resource management, in which failing to get it right means great suffering and even death for the handful of people in your charge, it's going to keep you very busy, challenged and, ultimately, feeling far prouder of yourself than most anything else in this list could hope to manage.

It's cruel, but it makes the things we take for granted in other management games feel like titanic accomplishments. Zeus: Master of Olympus might be as old as its Ancient Greek hills, but this 2D, historical city builder continues to hit the sweet spot of complexity, accessibly, prettiness and sheer charm.

There is war if you want it, but really this is a game about making cheese. Also wool, olive oil and theatre. An artisanal colony all of your own. Just watch out for wolves. And there are puns. Lots of Ancient Greek puns. You'll want the player-made resolution and widescreen fixes if you're planning on playing it today, but it remains an absolute delight.

Sure, it's free of the strife and toil of ancient life, in favour of a colourfully genteel take on the pre-tech era, but it just gets on with being the very best pure town-builder it can, those nerve-calming loops of gentle expansion and efficiency-pursuit.

Complex but approachable, Zeus is designed to be something you lose yourself in. Management games have nobly struck off in so many new directions now, but Zeus' take on their economy'n'craft core might just have never been bettered. The true star of the show, though, is its Steam Workshop support, where you can import or upload remarkable and terrible constructions. People have built some jaw-dropping stuff in Planet Coaster, and this age of massive monitors means that riding them is a genuine thrill.

Even if you're not into sharing with or borrowing from the wider world, Planet Coaster's focus is much more on building stuff yourself than it is plopping down prefabs.