They are masters of the map.īefore the event, I had played for several hours alone and was pleased that, along with Crusader Kings II, I’d discovered a ‘next generation’ that I was actually interested in.
Matters become more complicated still when several of the players are members of Paradox Development Studio. Grand strategy games diverge from the true course of the past quite swiftly, particularly when there are twenty player-controlled entities in the game and those players have regular breaks in which to scheme together, cliques of heels murmuring over Viking beer and assorted meats afflicted with the Ikeacidic bite of lingonberry jam. Inside the armoury, which contains a fine and macabre collection of dead kings’ clothes, we were instructed to build and destroy nations in an enormous multiplayer event. ‘We’ were a collection of games journalists, summoned from distant lands to this place, just a few blocks from Paradox headquarters. Stockholm’s old town seemed as brittle as a city of glass as I walked through the streets toward the Royal Armoury, Sweden’s oldest museum and a suitably historic venue in which to play out the end of the alternate timeline we had created during several play sessions the previous day. Do skulls even need to sleep, I wondered, thinking of Mort, Boni and other skulls I have known in the long days of my life. It was on the dawn of the second day that my horrific plot became fully-formed somewhere at the back of my sleep-deprived skull.
Inevitably, it transpired that I would be playing as France but I wasn't going to let that petty detail shake my resolve.
I packed my bags, steeled my nerves and prepared to present Rock, Paper, Shotgun the only way I know how - with fruitless acts of violence and a burning desire to reduce France to ashes. A few weeks ago, Paradox invited a group of journalists to Stockholm in order to see how much violence we could do to one another in a massive two-day multiplayer session of Europa Universalis IV.
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