Back in January 2025 I subjected the longsuffering Dr. Fiancée (then still Dr. Girlfriend) to an excited and probably tedious explanation of Sid Meier’s Colonization, the game that was probably most responsible for me becoming a history teacher.  Since then, I started a few games, but never finished them.  Like many Civ and Civ-adjacent games, Colonization drags a bit in the middle, becoming at times a laborious economic management sim (which, essentially, is what the game is).

However, the end of the game is exciting, and is essentially an entirely different game from the rest.  The goal is to declare independence from your mother country, which becomes possible only after building up a self-sufficient economy in the New World.  A major part of that economy is the ability to produce massive amounts of muskets and horses, as well as populating your colonies with immigrants and natural-born settlers who will use those muskets.

Late Monday night—far too late to be up before heading to work—I finished up a game as New France, successfully gaining independence from the mother country after a tough fight for independence.

The game plopped me down off the coast of modern-day Venezuela, and I built an empire that stretched to Colombia.  At one point I had a colony in Central America purely to mine silver, but I abandoned it later in the game so I would not have to defend it in the war of independence.  Because I had access to plenty of ore and could, therefore, make tools, I had every colony connected by roads, and even built an alternate road system through the Amazon so I’d have a “backdoor” to my colonies in the event the French King’s forces took any colonies.

The only exception was Penobscot, an English colony located on a Caribbean island (probably roughly analogous to Trinidad and Tobago), which I captured in the midgame.  That proved to be a headache, as it quickly fell to the king’s forces, and it was a pain liberating it.

I’d started this particular game about a week ago on a whim.  I’d been working my tail off to get ready for the Spring Jam, and decided to unwind with a little Colonization.  I was hoping for a North America start—I wanted to recreate something of the French fur trading empire—but decided to roll with the South American start (it seems that several of my starts on the Americas map have been right off the coast of South America).  I then had to leave the game alone for most of the weekend, but played a bit more on Memorial Day after Dr. Fiancée headed back home.  I resolved that I was going to play it out to independence, which I did after many hours.

I wasn’t sure if I was armed enough for the war, but I had a huge number of troops in my second colony, Montreal, all of which could easily deploy quickly to the neighboring colonies.  Unfortunately, my sole island colony, the aforementioned Penobscot, was the weakest, and quickly fell to the king’s forces.  I attempted to retake it with an amphibious invasion early in the war, but that backfired.  I managed to evacuate my troops in a colonial Dunkirk, and rearmed them to resist invasions on the mainland.

I only lost one other colony, Boston (another that I’d captured from the English after they settled in a choice spot in Venezuela, clearly in my sphere of influence).  Boston, however, was easier to retake, and the pro-independence sentiment there gave my soldiers a bonus when attacking.  It soon became apparent that the king’s forces were nearly exhausted, and I only needed to retake Penobscot and hold on tight for victory.

The second invasion of Trinidad/Penobscot was touch-and-go, but ultimately successful.  The king landed one last expeditionary force there, but I’d defeated enough of his ground forces that the game declared that I had won my independence.  The French “Parliament” (in reality, it would have been the Estates-General) deposed the king and granted independence to my colonies.

I did okay, according to the game’s byzantine scoring pattern.  I only destroyed one pesky Arawak settlement—I was peaceful towards the ubiquitous Tupi who inhabited the region around me—so the penalty for destroying Native American settlements was minimal (just -3 points).  Here is how I was ranked in the annals of history:

I like that having a mountain lion named after you is more prestigious than a college.  I remember getting the “stinging insect” one as a kid.  Yikes!

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take any other pictures of my empire, but use your imagination—a glorious French republic dominating northern South America, with a small Caribbean presence, absorbing conquered English colonies into a larger Francophone whole.  Sacre Bleu!

Now I’m jonesing for another game, even though I was honestly getting a bit bored with the one I was playing!  I really want to build a prairie empire as the English or Dutch, starting around modern-day New Orleans and then spreading into the Midwest.  The game discourages building inland colonies—if you lose all of your coastal colonies in the revolution, you lose!—and they are more difficult to manage, but I like the idea of building a large, well-fed prairie empire.  We’ll see!