Have you ever read a book which made you think it’d make a better game? Every so often I come up with a book that fits this category. In a novel you follow one path, that of the hero. Events unfold once, and whatever the setting, whatever the wider world of the book, you only ever see how things play out once.

In a game, your options open up. You can run the experiment over and over again and see what other outcomes are possible. Tolkien says of The Lord of the Rings that, had he wanted to make it a retelling of World War II the Free Peoples would have allied with Saruman and used the One Ring as a weapon to ultimately defeat Sauron. Would that have worked? Could they have done it with the alliance but not with the Ring, or the other way around?