Games by Paradox Interactive tend to attract a specific sort of person and you either are or aren’t that person. The games involve staring at maps and charts for hours at end and doing a bunch of micromanagement, and let’s face it, that either appeals to you or it doesn’t.

Well, yesterday, after spending about thirty minutes getting Crusader Kings 2 to run on my computer (You know your computer is bad when…) I spent a good several hours with the game, and while it’s probably too early for me to make some sort of definitive statement on the matter, I’m already getting the sense that this is, as I said in the title: A Paradox game for people who otherwise don’t play Paradox games.

Let me explain where I’m coming from here. Let’s take the other Paradox games. Victoria is about micromanaging pie charts, economy and government. Hearts of Iron is about micromanaging military forces and supplies. Europa Universalis goes for a more nuanced “just take over the world” approach and throws you right into this with no real explanation of what’s going on.

Crusader Kings, on the other hand, is about your family. The core mechanic of the game mostly revolves around who’s marrying who and who’s tutoring who and so on. For the average person, this is far more intuitive to pick up on than whether or not you need more supply convoys, or something.

Paradox continues to make the game accessible to newbies with the inclusion of comprehensive “hints” which explain every bit of the UI, a tech tree that mostly runs itself if you want it to, and military at the push of a button.

There is, of course, more to do for veterans or people who warm up to the game quickly. It’s a Paradox game, so there’s warfare, and you can also do fun and exciting things like assassinating people or throwing people into dungeons. But none of this stuff is exactly necessary if you’re just warming up to the game, and you can spend hours pouring over your family tree and selecting potential brides for your sons.

The result is that Crusader Kings 2 is a game that does a very good job of easing newbies into the Paradox family and introducing them to typical grand strategy concepts and UI features, while still maintaining a decent amount of complexity for those who want it. It used to be that I’d recommend a newcomer to the genre try Europa Universalis 3 as their first game, but I think I’m going to have to change that recommendation to Crusader Kings 2. This really is a solid, enjoyable game so far, and if any of you guys have been wanting to make the jump to grand strategy for a while but have been iffy on it, well, now is a great time to do it.