Ambition isn't always a good thing in strategy-game design. When developers push the envelope too far, they often end up with either an interface that plays like a logic puzzle, or so many statistics that it would be less painful to smack yourself in the face with an economics textbook. So it's something of a miracle that Supreme Ruler 2010 is downright user-friendly. Even though the BattleGoat Studios production is as elaborate as anything this side of the rather boat anchorlike SuperPower 2, this is one playable and enjoyable geopolitical simulation. Complexity and accessibility are rarely so well-balanced in a strategy game.

OK, this doesn't look very inviting, but trust us, the user interface is more friendly that it appears at first glance.

First impressions won't leave you with that idea, however. BattleGoat and publisher Strategy First ship the game with a dense 150-page manual and terse tutorials with no interactivity aside from that provided by reading dozens of text boxes. The background story is also complex. Four pages are required to recount the tale of a debt-ridden United States, which is self-destructing economically and taking the rest of the planet with it. OPEC reacts to American troubles by changing the world's oil currency from greenbacks to Euros in mid-2005, and this causes the biggest market crash in history. Economies are so devastated that most nations splinter along regional and ethnic lines. When the game begins in 2010, the US is a collection of independent states, the Canadian provinces have abandoned confederation, Europe has broken into fiefdoms reminiscent of the medieval era, and so on.

You're dropped into this mess as the ruler of one of these new independent territories. Play can be turn-based or real time. Both function in similar ways, although playing in turns slows the action down so much that it's a better option to go real time and adjust speeds or pause the game whenever catastrophes pile up. Objectives vary, with you either attempting to emerge as the leading state in a specific region in a couple of dozen scenarios (reunifying Canada, putting China back together by force, taking over the Middle East with a unified Israel-Jordan, and so on) spread across the world or trying to conquer the planet in the global campaign.

Difficulty varies depending on your choice here, of course. Taking on, well, everybody as the newly free state of Scotland is a lot more difficult than simply helping Alabama win over its neighbors in what used to be the southeastern US. There are a lot of nations on the globe, too, with virtually every province, state, or territory in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia deciding to go it alone. Each one of these mini-states is fully modeled, too, with governments, military forces, economies, natural resources, social services, taxation systems, and so forth.

Regardless of what mode of play you choose, cabinet ministers keep games from becoming unwieldy. Instead of handling all of a state's affairs by yourself, you hire ministers from a pool of candidates to look after six portfolios--defense, military operations, state, treasury, commerce, and interior--and keep your eyes on the big picture. Policies are set by assigning priorities to each member of the cabinet, like asking the interior minister to improve the nation's technology, or the minister of state to secretly undermine enemies, or the minister of commerce to produce products for export. Every move has its pros and cons, so there are no shortcuts when it comes to making your citizens happy. Order your interior minister to improve the social safety net, for instance, and this sets up a tug-of-war between social assistance programs and the military.

Decisions are largely made via ministers, who can be told what to do just like all good government flunkies.

And since ministers come with names, detailed biographies, personalities, and political leanings (conservative, moderate, and liberal) that affect their performance, jobs don't always get done as expected. Put the wrong person in the wrong place and you can actually have a minister fighting against your ideas unless you decide to micromanage and lock orders so that they can't change them. We learned from personal experience that it just isn't a good idea to hire a flaming liberal to run the Ontario defense department while planning a covert military buildup with which to crush Quebec.