I tried to save the USSR in 1985 with a hip Gen Z leader and all I got for my trouble was a drunk population and total national bankruptcy

I am, as is well-known, an absolute sicko for any videogame that lets me conjure up some fabulous alternate history. Crusader Kings: what if Novgorod conquered Muscovy? Europa Universalis: what if Ethiopia became the beating, imperial heart of the world economy? Hearts of Iron 4: what if any of WW2's key players were replaced by someone only loosely aware of what a tank is (I am not good at Hearts of Iron 4)?

But the king of the alt-history genre isn't Paradox. Not for me, anyway. It's the ramshackle assortment of socialism sims made by Nostalgames, whose main stock-in-trade is political sims that put you in charge of historical communist states—the USSR, China, the DDR, and so on—at moments of crisis. Of which there were many.

I've actually written about one of those before—China: Mao's Legacy, where I attempted to go full Gang of Four on China in the period immediately following Mao Zedong's death, only to get put on trial for my trouble. I love these games, but I wasn't kidding about them being ramshackle. They're creaky, ungainly things. The UI is ugly, the mechanics are badly explained, and the English is lacking. Actually, it's downright incomprehensible at times.

Which is why I got very excited when I realised there was a new one and it looked a lot slicker than any of Nostalgames' previous efforts in the genre. Crisis In The Kremlin: The Cold War feels more remake than sequel, which is only appropriate, since 2017's Crisis In The Kremlin (also by Nostalgames) was itself a remake of an old '90s Microprose game of the same name. Everything is much the same: pick a leader in 1985, decide a goal, off you go. But now, the UI is a bit nicer and the English is much better.

Anyway, I decided what the Soviet Union of 1985 needed was a hip, Gen Z leader to unite everyone.

Unbreakable union of freeborn republics

Not literally Gen Z, mind you. For one thing, the USSR didn't survive long enough to experience TikTok. But in spirit, I wanted to embody all the radicalism that I'd embodied with my Mao's Legacy character in a new, Soviet context, and I didn't just want to go turbo-Stalin again.

That in mind, I toddled over to the game's new create-a-vozhd tool (the game doesn't call it that, but it should) and created a 35-year-old woman named Cool Greg*. Cool Greg was unanimously selected by the Central Committee to serve as the USSR's paramount leader. She was also an alcoholic party intriguer. She contained multitudes, our Cool Greg.

My goal, really, was to see if nu-Crisis In The Kremlin had a sufficient level of polish that I could now recommend it without caveats. Even I, who played a fair chunk of the old game, sometimes struggled to navigate it.

The answer is, frankly, yes. Everything is entirely legible now, and Cool Greg's programme of aggressive reform got off to a very good start. I thought the most Gen Z thing I could do would be to get everyone an iPad, so I immediately set our national research to focus on the cyberneticisation of the planned economy. I also waged war on the fuddy-duddy factions that congealed in the Central Committee like black mould: out with the conservatives and moderates. In with the liberal democrats and neo-Stalinists.

This was rather like trying to base my power on dogs and cats simultaneously, but it went pretty well for a while there. Crisis In The Kremlin is heavily event-driven, a bit like a Paradox game. You can dip into different screens to make decisions and take votes, but for the most part, you're accelerating through the years and waiting for the game to throw circumstances at you. One of the earliest is choosing your right-hand man, a later one concerns your response to America's SDI program, others make you pick a side in the Iran-Iraq War, and so on.

I did not intentionally try to blow it. I wanted to pick fun extremes, sure—a lot of events will give you some namby-pamby third-way option that doesn't change much of anything—but if I noticed my funds were in the red or that the world was teetering eerily close to nuclear war, I tried to push things the other way.

Alas, the constant veering between two polar extremes of Soviet internal and foreign policy did not, somehow, result in an ironclad domestic stability. Washington didn't know what to expect: one day I'd call up all fire and brimstone, the next I'd be unilaterally abolishing half my nuclear arsenal. I veered between supporting Iraq and Iran and alternated between supreme thriftiness and 'turn on the money hose'-level spending. About the only firm policy I committed and stuck to was dramatically increasing the national supply of cheap vodka. This did not help.

By the end of 1986, the USA was one DEFCON rank away from worldwide nuclear war, and the Soviet coffers were bare. Also, everyone was trashed. I was unceremoniously deposed from power and probably replaced by world-famous Pizza Hut spokesperson Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mine was not a glorious reign, but unlike in every prior Nostalgames' title, I knew what every decision I made meant as I was making it. For an alt-history sicko like me, that's absolutely enormous news.

*I Googled this name while writing to make sure I hadn't accidentally named my character after some kind of famous online racist, and learnt there's apparently a Kinda Funny person that goes by this name. Any resemblances between Kinda Funny's Cool Greg and the 35-year-old female leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 are unintentional.