Video games have often been seen as a rush of quick gameplay or action that are just mindless time-wasters. While this is obviously untrue, a vast majority of games throughout the medium’s history have cemented this idea with a focus on action. But, more thoughtful, brain-testing games have always been a thing through its history, with management games being some of the first games.
Management games have often earned a reputation of being boring and stale, but when you pull back and look at the industry, so many of the best games are part of this genre. With their more relaxing and planning-focused gameplay, they’ve kept players captivated in so many ways.
10 Papers, Please
While some games let you manage more fantastical things like entire planets or a lovecraftian cult, others take the idea of management much more literally such as with Papers, Please. Papers, Please is a more experimental game that sees you work as a border officer for a fictional tyrannical country called Arstotzka, dealing with increasing rules and responsibilities as your nation grows more corrupt.
While Papers Please does lack the overall planning nature of the rest of the genre, it certainly fits in with much slower gameplay of having to manage border crossing paperwork. The game is more of a puzzle game where you have to pour over every detail of people coming through like a detective to spot any contradictions, all while experiencing the powerful story of people coming into the country.
9 Cultist Simulator
One barrier for people enjoying management type games like this is how many rules and layers of complexity there can be, but Cultist Simulator takes that barrier and turns it into its greatest strength. Cultist Simulator sees you take control of a nobody who ends up discovering eldritch knowledge, establishing their own cult to conduct rituals and ascend into the Mansus.
Cultist Simulator is a very complex game and that’s the point, the game never bothers to explain a mechanic, instead leaving you to piece it together slowly yourself as if you really were discovering arcane knowledge. It makes for an unforgettable first time with the game and even afterwards, the game is a thrilling resource management game with such rich theming.
8 Slime Rancher 2
Just because a game focuses on management doesn’t mean it can’t throw in some action as well — plenty spice up their gameplay in this way — such as with Slime Rancher 2. Slime Rancher 2 sees you settling down on a strange alien world full of slimes, hoping to ranch them up for their profitable plorts and make a life for yourself.
Slime Rancher 2’s main hook is both its artstyle, which is adorable, and the exploration and collection of slimes which is a very fun experience with so much to see and do in the world. But once you’re done collecting, the game transforms into a deep and complex management game with slimes needing different pens, other aspects you need to care for like farming and gadgets to automate it, and even a full stock market for slime! It’s quite a rich experience.
7 Stardew Valley
Management is rather broad and has many types of games within it like farming simulators, financial management, resource management, and even social management. Stardew Valley decides to be all of them at once. Stardew Valley is a farming simulator that sees you inherit and farm and move to a sleepy town to get away from modern living and build a new life.
One of the main draws of Stardew is just how much there is to do within it as you can decide to focus on farming, fishing, cooking, mining, socializing, or adventuring or any mixture of them. And every single aspect is made just complex enough that it’s fun to get lost in while able to be balanced with the others and the overall financial management, making for an experience that is surprisingly relaxing for how much it has.
6 Frostpunk
While most management games tend to be more laid back and relaxing, others decide to be absolutely brutal with forcing you to barely scrape by and consider every decision such as with Frostpunk. Frostpunk sees you as the leader of the last city in a frozen world where only steam technology keeps your city going, having to choose between your morals and resources in order to survive in this world.
Frostpunk is a game that doesn’t pull its punches as it will hit you with the harshest of conditions and force you into situations where you may be willing to do horrible things out of desperation to save your city. Frostpunk is a game that tests morality in a more nuanced way, forcing you to play better and smarter if you want to just barely scrape by being a moral person. It makes for an unforgettable experience.
5 Rimworld
Despite not being heavy on story at all, management games manage to often create memorable stories through gameplay and the random little things that happen, and Rimworld takes advantage of this. Rimworld sees you having to manage a sci-fi colony of crashed colonists while dealing with the planet’s harsh conditions and random events dealt out by an AI storyteller.
While the management aspects of Rimworld are already great, the thing that makes it stand out is the AI storyteller system. This AI storyteller will have a different personality and style of crafting the story and will dish out events to shape a story for your colonists. And this works due to it giving just the right amount of info and character for players to get their imagination going and fill in the gaps to make unforgettably rich stories in their mind.
4 Factorio
Management games have a reputation for being complex and hard to understand, and while most simply just have a bit of a learning curve, games like Factorio really justify that reputation. Factorio is a game that sees you trying to survive and establish a base on an alien world, building up massive factory machines to expand and fight off the natural wildlife.
Factorio doesn’t start out super complex, but it quickly grows in complexity as the game gives you a load of tools to build your factory and then asks you to figure out the logistics to build a perfectly optimized machine. While this may sound boring, it makes for an addicting gameplay loop where your factory just continues to grow and grow, and it truly becomes a wonder to behold because you figured out every solution in its complex web.
3 Cities: Skylines
While management games are more popular now than ever, there was a period where many of the great management series sort of just stopped, and so now we see lots of spiritual successors such as Cities: Skylines. Cities: Skylines is a spiritual successor to the SimCity games and sees you building up and managing a city to maximum efficiency.
Cities: Skylines is an incredibly simple game to get into, with aspects like making buildings, managing money, and just overall building your city from the ground up, and it allows for creativity and fun to flourish. For those wanting deeper mechanics, Cities: Skylines offers a lot of deeper mechanics such as districts, policies, managing your city departments, and more that will keep you perfecting your city for hours on end.
2 The Sims
While most management games are usually very serious and give the player lots of control, sometimes it can be more fun to sit back and watch the chaos in The Sims. The Sims is a game that sees you create a family of Sims and play god in their life, watching them go through the stages of life and helping them achieve their dreams.
The Sims is far simpler than most management games, having very few methods of controlling your Sims family, and that broadness is part of the appeal. The Sims is a game where you set things on a loose track and have fun watching how things end up. The sandbox nature and ways the game can be twisted are what have kept the series so popular.
1 Rollercoaster Tycoon
One of the main appeals of management as a genre is working through the nitty gritty of finances and resources to see something wonderful take off, and nothing shows this better than Rollercoaster Tycoon. Rollercoaster Tycoon is a rather simple game, dropping you on a plot of land that you have to turn into a successful theme park within a couple of years.
Rollercoaster Tycoon gives you the ability to build the rides of your dreams, making wild coasters and incredible attractions that let your creativity soar. But, the game isn’t just a sandbox, as you have to care for the nitty gritty aspects of a theme park before you can get a single person on a ride, and due to the care you have to take to get to the point where you can make those big rides, it makes the sight of a massive, flourishing park the stuff of dreams.