You can meander through life without any great plan and still find yourself embroiled in countless intrigues, wars and trysts. And all this soapy dynastic drama just has a brilliant flow to it, carrying you along with it.

Getting to grips with it is thankfully considerably easier this time around, thanks to a helpful nested tooltip system and plenty of guidance. It's only going to get larger and more ambitious as the inevitable DLC piles up, but even in its vanilla form CK3 is a ceaseless storyteller supported by countless complex systems that demand to be mucked around with and tweaked. At first glance it might seem a bit too familiar, but an even greater focus on roleplaying and simulating the lifestyles of medieval nobles, along with a big bag of new and reconsidered features, makes it well worth jumping ship to the latest iteration. It's a huge grand strategy RPG, more polished and cohesive than the venerable CK2, and quite a bit easier on the eyes, too. There's plenty to keep you occupied, and more on the horizon, with the Immortal Empires mega-campaign that combines all three games into one big brawl on its way.Ĭrusader Kings 3, the best strategy game of 2020, has usurped its predecessor's spot on the list, unsurprisingly. The Chaos factions in particular are a monstrous delight, especially the Daemons of Chaos, which not only lets you recruit units from every daemonic faction, you even get a fully customisable leader with limbs that you can mix and match. The real treat, though, is the list of factions. It's an impressive campaign, though the narrative elements and Realm of Chaos jaunts make it a bit more linear than most. Total War: Warhammer 3, the conclusion to Creative Assembly's Warhammer trilogy, is also its strangest and most experimental, letting players leave the traditional Total War sandbox every 30 or so turns to journey through the Realm of Chaos, where the domains of the Chaos gods exist, culminating in huge survival battles that draw from tower defence games, with fortifications, in-battle recruitment and waves of enemies.

Mac strategy games