Seven Kingdoms Conquest

Five years ago, Brian Reynolds arrived on the real-time strategy scene and broke the rules with Rise of Nations, a deep but manageable game that put the S in RTS. But five years before that, when Reynolds was just getting warmed up on turn-based strategy games, a fellow named Trevor Chan was already breaking those rules and putting that S into RTS. Chan’s Seven Kingdoms series did things you just didn’t do in real time strategy: diplomacy, espionage, hiring neutral units from the map, mixing fantasy with history, and the sort of depth you weren’t supposed to do in real time. Unfortunately, the games had the dubious honor of being “cult hits,” meaning they didn’t sell well enough to spawn imitators. It would be another five years of Command & Conquer and Warcraft clones until Reynolds showed up.