If you’ve not played Dwarf Fortress, the staggeringly detailed fantasy world simulator, you can’t fully comprehend what a nightmare it is to play. It’s not the ASCII gaphics that bamboozle you, it’s the menus, which hide information and common actions across umpteen different enormous menus, each of which must be accessed with a different button press.

Look at the screenshot above, then. You might think it looks like the UI from an early 2000s Paradox game that’s yet to have an art pass. But to me, it looks like heaven.

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2020 was a pretty good year for management games, but nothing released in the past 12 months has impressed us enough to squeeze its way into our best management games list. Don’t worry, though – it’s only because there are already so many classics to choose from. If you’re looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.

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Last year brought RPG gems like Disco Elysium. Was there an RPG as good released in 2020? We’ve updated our list of the best RPGs of all time to reflect the best of the past year – and there’s still dozens of older classics, too.

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In case you weren’t aware, I’ve started a brand new Dwarf Fortress diary series, which I kicked off with a fortress-founding video featuring Tarn Adams, the game’s lovable dad. This series concerns the fortress of Inkrose: a settlement founded by seven religious fanatics, intent on living by a set of incredibly impractical commandments which I sourced from the capricious dwellers of the Kitfox Dwarf Fortress Discord server. At the end of our first episode, we left our dwarves living in a hovel with no doors, a pitiful pile of weeds to feed themselves with, and seven boisterous, holy beak dogs circling them with ever-more-menacing playfulness.

Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that things get… quite interesting from here. But before we move on to that, I want to do something I always regretted not doing with the Basement of Curiosity, which is provide you with a proper profile for each and every founding dwarf. Come on in, there’s pictures and everything.

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Once upon a time, seven dwarves set out into the jungle with the simple dream of constructing an underground chimp jail. You can’t write sentences like that about most games. But in the context of Dwarf Fortress, the legendary world simulator under permanent construction by programmer Tarn Adams and his brother Zach, it is a perfectly reasonable statement.

Dwarf Fortress is my favourite game. And since it’s essentially a machine for generating weird fantasy stories, it’s even more fun to narrate than it is to actually play. Hence my previous diary series – The Basement Of Curiosity – which concerned the aforementioned chimp zoo. After a lengthy 25-episode run, the Basement finally came to an end on camera, at this year’s EGX Digital event. And while I won’t spoil its conclusion, I strongly recommend you watch it for yourself, right here. The ending will… surprise you.

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Step aside Basement Of Curiosity, The Tarn Commandments demand it. Last week’s PAX Online X EGX Digital event brought us many a wonderful livestream, including a load of Dwarf Fortress content from our resident dwarf expert, Nate Crowley.

Sadly, the sun has set on his long-running series The Basement Of Curiosity – a weekly diary chronicling his attempts to build an illegal, underground zoo in the management sim. But from the ashes of the basement comes an all new series, The Tarn Commandments, handed down by none-other than Dwarf Fortress dev Tarn Adams himself.

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Feeling peckish, halflings? Bay 12 Games are still stirring away at Dwarf Fortress‘ new and improved Steam version, but they’ve popped out of the kitchen a mo to give us a taste of the sprawling mountainfolk sim’s spruced up new interface – turning a simple stone room into a temple to meal deal sandwiches with a streamlined new painting tool.

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‘Building’ is a pretty broad theme. There are a lot of games where you build things, after all, and they can be very different. Helpfully, then, I’ve split this list of the 20 best building games on PC into four sections, each covering a sub-category of this big, messy genre.

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The halls of the mountain king never looked quite so clean. As part of the Guerrilla Collective’s big not-E3 Showcase, Dwarf Fortress co-creator Tarn Adams ran us through the early stages Dwarf Fortress’ prettied-up new paid edition – casually commentating over the genesis of an entire fantasy world before closing on a merry band of dwarves striking their first picks against a colourful new mountain home.

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As part of its eventual launch on Steam, daunting simulation Dwarf Fortress has been planning a big visual overhaul. “Now with graphics!” Bay 12 proclaim on the store page. In a new little update, they’re giving us a look at what the generated world maps will look like with these non-ASCII pixels—though, yes, you’ll still be able to use the symbols if you prefer. The work-in-progress map is still pretty cluttered as Dwarf Fortress maps tend to be, but dang is it easier to look at.

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