If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my time with sims like Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and that one game that gave me the historic opportunity to be the first person to write “Rudolf Hilferding” on this website, it’s that I wouldn’t cut it in a time of crisis. Material conditions would slam-dunk me into the dustbin of history like Kobe Bryant. I just don’t have the mettle that let figures like Napoleon, Alexander, or Caesar steer the ship of state so effortlessly in periods of tumult.
The latest game to remind me of this? Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917, another incredibly me-coded, free, and browser-based gem from the same dev—Autumn Chen—who made the aforementioned Rudolf Hilferding sim. Where Chen’s last game had you try (and fail, in my case) to keep the German Social Democratic Party alive and thriving in the chaos of the late Weimar Republic period, Petrograd puts you in charge of one of several competing parties in the months leading up to the Russian Empire’s October Revolution in 1917.
On a first playthrough, you can take charge of either the Kadets (capitalists), Mensheviks (nerds), or the Socialist-Revolutionaries (like if Tom and Barbara from The Good Life ran a bombing campaign). You can’t play the Bolsheviks—the game keeps them for a second playthrough—which is like making a Justice League game where you can’t play Batman, but fine.
My attempt to guide the Mensheviks to some kind of rapprochement with the Bolsheviks, its estranged sister party, kind of hit the rocks when the latter launched an armed uprising and didn’t even think to call me about it.
My attempt to commit the Socialist-Revolutionaries to a truly internationalist policy on WW1 (an immediate end to the war even at the risk of revolution or civil war at home) was scuppered by fully half of my party suddenly starting their own party.
Even playing as Bolsheviks—which really ought to be easy mode—didn’t go well. I just, uh, kind of forgot to do the October Revolution? I got really into fiddling with the party makeup of the Petrograd Soviet and someone went and convened a government without me.
It’s great fun if you’re the same kind of nerd I am, and does an excellent job capturing just how chaotic, unpredictable and fractured this precise era of history was. You will constantly have to divide your attention between multiple concurrent crises—peasant revolts, the first world war, famine, inflation, attempted coups by left and right alike. It’s amazing anyone managed to seize control of things at all.
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