I’ve been playing some Freeciv Longturn lately. Freeciv is a free version of Sid Meier’s famous game Civilization (which I’m not going to explain), and Freeciv Longturn is a version of Freeciv where each turn lasts 12-24 hours (as against minutes in ordinary Freeciv), so a game can easily take months and you can put as much or as little effort into it as you like.

It’s great fun, and there are also a lot of real-life concepts and skills clarified and practiced in the game. Certain real-life skills would make you a better player, and, conversely, learning to play the game well could improve certain areas in your real life.

Here are some of them (some overlapping or otherwise related):

• Goals and plans. Kind of obvious and a part of many games, but I mention it as a background to some of the points below.
• Expansion and consolidation. You need balance between the two. If you expand without consolidation your empire will be stretched thin and weak; it’s growing too fast (you will not have proper defence, enough roads, and so on). But if you overemphasize consolidation over expansion you may get full control over what you have, but you miss out on growth and will be left behind. This has a lot of parallells to real life.
• Flexibility. You set goals and make plans, but the world is changing all the time, and sometimes in a way that makes the old goal and/or plan obsolete. You have to update or suffer the consequences. (But the principles remain the same throughout, just like in life.)
• Decision making. It’s easy to get lost among all options; a good general decision-making skill, perhaps even an explicit method, helps.
• Risk/benefit assessment. Important part of the decision making process.
• Dealing with the unknown (and unexpected). Also important in the decision making process. Like life, but unlike chess, you don’t have full information about the world and its entities, but you still have to take into account what you don’t know. You need to make inferences and guesses about the unknown from the known.
• Stress, frustration and hopelessness management. If you take the game seriously and invest a lot of time and energy, you will have strong emotional reactions to what’s going on (like when someone launches an unexpected big attack, threatening to ruin the things you’ve been working on for weeks), and these need to be managed.
• Cooperation and conflict. Plenty of both, like always when you interact with humans.
• Combining micro- and macro management. Both attention to detail and the whole picture are needed.
• Resource management. Allocation of limited resources with alternative uses. That’s also central to the human existence in general, on many levels.