Santa Paravia, a.k.a. Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio is a relatively simplistic, but surprisingly engaging turn-based strategy game based on the premise that you're Machiavellian Prince-style lord of a city-state in Renaissance Italy. Like many similar games of its era, it's more or less a zero sum, probabilistic-modeled type of game with different clothing atop it. The choices you need to make aren't too different from those that you'd make in a more modern game- just far fewer of them corresponding with the hardware capabilities of games of the day.
Base resource management and handling of your state's governmental policy are key- wool and wheat, versus troops and fortification- whether to invest in industry, and if so, what sort of industry to enter, how liberally or harshly do your populace get taxed, how do you manage issues around trade like tariffs. It's the old economic question of "guns or butter" with its renaissance twist, with as many axes as can really properly strain the 8-bit hardware of the era.
Despite the fact that it's less complicated by today’s standards (c.f.: the Europa Universalis series, or perhaps Imperialism/Imperialism II) it's not a bad game by any means. I can remember whiling away hour after hour attempting to suss out the formula behind it with
little to no success. The addition of random death and the curse of rats- more or less a standby to induce randomness during the era (c.f.: M.U.L.E, and its spoilage, as well as its food-eating insects), vary the game enough for pretty substantial replayability. If memory serves me, the Apple ][ version was endowed with a passable multiplayer mode- hot-seat style- I can't recall the capability in the C64 version, but the circumstances under which I played were different between the two.
I'm told that the game has been ported from its original TRS-80 version to ANSI C, and that some modern reinterpretations of it have been made. I've never had the pleasure of trying the TRS-80 version, just the Apple ][ and Commodore versions of it, but I can't imagine any way the original could be particularly improved. So here's to Santa Paravia. Without the early fascination it engendered in me, I doubt that I would've considered history and historiography as an interesting enough field, and here's to the influence it had in paving the way for later, more thorough beasts. In the greater scheme of things, this is "Civilization"'s great, great, great grandfather- it deserves to be remembered.
