Juchetopia

Moscow sends the bill

Korea, 1953. The armistice is signed and the Soviet Union wants its money back: $50 million every month. Pay off the whole debt and you win. Miss an installment and the sanctions start, the factions get restless and sooner or later your own people turn on you

Rebuild a broken country

Build mines and steel mills in the provinces of the North. You set grain rations for each class, pay wages and send workers wherever the plan needs them. Coal, gold and magnesite are sold on three world markets, and the money goes to Moscow. When exports fall short, the villages go hungry

Rule by dossier and decree

Four factions fight over the Party: the Partisans, the Soviet faction, the Yan'an faction and the Dogmatists. The Ministry of State Security keeps files on all of them. You decide who gets purged and who gets promoted, push decrees through the Central Committee plenum and try to keep Moscow's advisers happy

Two truths every month

The party newspaper reports record harvests. Leaflets from the South describe the same month very differently. Every event reaches your desk as a document, whether a letter, a cipher, a decree or a secret file, drawn in the style of old newspaper engravings

Is the armistice line forever?

You can train divisions, draw front lines on the map and order an offensive across the armistice line. You can also break with Moscow or Beijing. When a province changes hands, red ink spreads across the map

Features

• Real-time strategy with pause, starting in 1953

• Nine endings, including paying the last installment, reunification, a coup and capitulation

• Over 100 events, some historical, others caused by your own decisions

• 43 provinces in Korea, Manchuria, the Soviet Far East and western Japan

• A society of peasants, workers, specialists, cadres and soldiers, sorted by songbun

• A world market split into trade blocs, with oil shocks and the collapse of Comecon

• Five-year plans, a tech tree and a railway network

• The Little Red Book, an in-game handbook that walks you through the game

• Three difficulty levels