If anyone ever turns his basement into a museum of strategy gaming, the broken card table that holds the best of the turn-based era probably only needs to have one game on it. If you’re wondering why I’m dragging Civilization into a retrospective about developer Frog City’s Imperialism series, the answer is that I’m not. Although few people ever played the original Imperialism or its sequel, those who did probably can’t forget them. Which is why it’s so sad that the best tribute they’re ever likely to get is a place of honor on a card table in some basement.

Games are alternately criticized for being idle diversions divorced from reality and for being vehicles for reinforcing reality’s worst lessons. The lesson game designers should take from Frog City’s masterpieces is that not all world conquest strategy games have to devolve into micromanagement messes in the endgame. The game’s centralized economy and interface design have you feeling like you’re in the offices of the East India Company managing your far-flung colonies. The amount of busywork at the end isn’t substantially greater than at the beginning, and you get a great idea of why a country might send soldiers halfway across the world to find sugar cane. If you were desperate enough to try to teach historical concepts using computer games, you could at least defend your choice of this series to the inevitable local newspaper reporter snooping in your basement.

But these games succeed precisely because they evoke history so well. It’s easy to latch on to Imperialism II and its wide-open New World, because the joy of discovering a square with diamonds in the desert is the same feeling you get from opening a crate and finding a magical two-handed sword. You might tell the newspaper reporter that the New World acts as an outlet for Great Power avarice, which temporarily defers open conflict back home. Which, yeah, it sure does. But for gamers, the tension of racing to develop a tobacco farm is exciting not just because you can make cigars, but because making cigars is a kind of leveling up. It doesn’t seem like much until you actually click the slider.

As gaming museum pieces, though, these games are far more notable for their introversion. By contrast with Civilization IV’s ostentatious outward development, Imperialism grows under the surface, like a tumor or an alien baby. All the progress you make is hidden in your little spreadsheet. Sure, you can see the iron mines and sugar plantations on the map, but a nation’s real strength is in its labor force, which exists on screens known only to you. While Imperialism II sees rampant expansion into the New World, the Old World borders remain frustratingly static for most of the game. It’s all silent scheming; watching for incremental jumps in favor with minor nations; balancing research, labor, your military, and merchant fleets; and seething with envy over a neighbor’s generous natural resource deposits. How come his country starts with all that timber? This game is biased!

And then, after years of silent toil, the dam breaks. The last 10% of the game sees 90% of the action, as the Great Powers make their moves and alliances drag the unfortunate and unwilling to an unpleasant reckoning. While the series’ weakest link—its tactical engine—holds it back just a bit, its basic structure is unchanged: a narrative of hours spent peering silently at a dozen spreadsheets adorned with 19th-century icons and relationship grids, followed by a furious tantrum.

And that’s why Imperialism demands a place in the museum ahead of every other game you’ve probably actually heard of. It’s archetypical of a hobby that was born, nurtured, and matured by introverts. Modern games could never get away with this much deferred gratification. You’d end up with reviewers who put in their obligatory three hours and decided that nothing happened, because it was impossible to balance all the inputs and make any progress. Too much thinking and not enough payoff. I’m supposed to be satisfied with eventually annexing Denmark because I bought all its tin ore? What kind of escapism is that?

Fine. But that’s another era of gaming. And another card table.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #195 as part of its Revisionist History series of re-examinations of old games.