OGame

OGame built its entire concept of browser strategy on patience and planning back in 2002 – players started with a single home planet, mined resources, built structures, and gradually assembled a fleet of ships they could use to colonize other planets or attack rivals across the universe. Unlike action games, most of what happened ran in real time even while players were offline, so they had to carefully plan when to send their fleet out on a mission and when to instead keep their defenses at home guarding the planet.

The German studio Gameforge used this game to launch an entire genre of browser-based strategy games with a space theme, and OGame became one of its best-known and longest-lived entries on the market. The game worked on the principle of servers, or universes, where players competed for dominance, formed alliances, and planned coordinated attacks on shared targets, which made it something of a social game despite being primarily about managing numbers, resources, and buildings on screen.

OGame received a number of localizations around the world and remains active to this day, even though its golden age falls more around the mid-2000s, when browser strategy games had no competition yet from mobile apps and social games on phones. Thanks to the experience gained from OGame, Gameforge later built an entire studio on other similar titles and became one of the biggest European publishers of browser games.

Why play: For players fond of slow, carefully planned strategy games with long-term planning, who don't mind devoting attention to the game even away from their computer.