Fall From Heaven

You know, I haven't been mentioning Fall From Heaven on my Game of the Year lists but I probably should. (Not that I have an official list, but it come up in conversation. Our boss passed the time waiting for a meeting asking everyone theirs.)

It's a Civilization 4 mod in the style of Master of Magic (the best game ever). Spells and magic and orcs and elves and good and evil. But it really goes deeper than I'd expect for a mod. Every civ has radically different gameplay, built from familiar Civ concepts. The tech tree is slow and flat, which encourages you to really specialize your tech direction. And there are whole systems for heroes, spells, summoning, animal capture, and so on. And that's not even mentioning the Armaggedon Counter. It's better than most commercial games.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=190
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=171398

There's a new version coming out this week which promises to continue the trend of quality. And also promises to make my wife quite angry. She already refers to Civilization as "that other woman".