China: Mao’s Legacy is like an absurdly specific Paradox game on a tight budget, and also one of the best sims I’ve ever played

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Joshua Wolens

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“China,” observed Charles de Gaulle*, “is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese people.” You can’t knock the guy: he was right. There are loads of Chinese people in China, it turns out, and they’re all upset with me specifically. My strategy of allying with the most widely despised people in the nation has not paid dividends. The wars I have gotten us into? Unpopular. Loosing the army on a funeral? An ambitious, some might say courageous move, and yet not one that has earned me friends.

But that’s the way it goes in China: Mao’s Legacy, a rickety political strategy game from the same studio that put out such bangers as Crisis in the Kremlin, Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall, and Collapse: A Political Simulator. Canny readers will note a theme here—simulations of historical epochs that you might politely call ‘transitions’ or honestly call ‘disintegrations’.

The world map.

(Image credit: Nostalgames)

Mao’s Legacy is no different. The game kicks off in April 1976. Former premier, consummate diplomat, and archetypal reformer Zhou Enlai has been dead for three months. Mao Zedong—the chairman himself—is visibly ailing. Factions are already vying for control over the post-Mao direction of the country like dogs over a T-bone steak.

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