Polytopia is developed by Midjiwan, an indie game company. It is a cheap game. You can play the whole thing for free, or you can unlock additional tribes to play for $1-2 apiece. The most you can spend on the game is $30.
(This, by the way, strikes me as capitalism at its best. Midjiwan built a fun game. People play and enjoy it. Those who really enjoy it decide to spend a perfectly reasonable amount of money to enjoy it some more. Good for them. They seem like good folks. I wish them the best.)
But it is not a particularly addictive game. Starcraft is a harder and more addictive strategy game than this. Slay the Spire is a harder and more addictive mobile strategy game. Tears of the Kingdom is not a strategy game, but my god you will lose a month of your life to Tears of the Kingdom.
Elon Musk really likes the game Polytopia. He has skipped birthday parties and international business meetings to play the game. He has effused that it is \u201Cthe best game ever.\u201D He has posited that it is more complicated than chess.
Walter Isaacson treats Polytopia as a window into Musk\u2019s unique, brilliant mind. He devotes nearly as many pages to the game as he does to the Boring Company. (Which is, y\u2019know, one of his actual companies. It has a multi-billion dollar valuation.) He even prints eight \u201Clife lessons\u201D that Musk and his hangers-on think you can distill from the game.
I left Polytopia out of my original review of the book. It seemed like a bit of a strange personality tick. The parallel to SBF\u2019s mobile gaming habit was a little interesting. But I had never heard of the game. I\u2019d never played it. And I already had more than enough material to work with.
A few months later, while visiting some family on the west coast, I noticed my brother-in-law playing Polytopia on his phone. \u201CY\u2019know, Elon Musk says that\u2019s the greatest game of all time,\u201D I said to him. My brother-in-law gave me a quizzical look. He\u2019s a pretty well-adjusted fellow, neither addicted to Musk nor Polytopia. He just thought the game was reasonably fun.
Here\u2019s what I can tell you about the game: It\u2019s\u2026 fine. It\u2019s a nice little time-killer. Calling it the \u201Cbest game ever\u201D is a bit like calling Ant-Man and the Wasp the greatest film in the history of cinema. It tells us far more about the psyche of the person making the claim than it does about the game itself.
The game isn\u2019t trying to be Fortnite or Roblox. It isn\u2019t attempting to redefine gaming. There is nothing particularly unique or innovative about it. If you enjoy turn-based strategy games, you\u2019ll probably like it. But you\u2019ll also figure the whole thing out pretty quickly. I was able to beat the game on its hardest settings with every character class after a couple dozen playthroughs.
The \u201Ctech tree\u201D is straightforward and, after a few playthroughs, it becomes pretty obvious which slots to unlock in which order. (You\u2019ll need archers to defeat early-game opponents. You\u2019ll need bombers to overwhelm late-game opponents. If you have a lot of bombers, you are unbeatable.)
The game constantly engages your executive functions. You gauge conditions and make resource allocation decisions, proceeding across the map in a straightforward manner. It only takes about 45 minutes to play a full game. It\u2019s a nice way to occupy yourself during a short plane flight.
Looking back on Isaacson\u2019s book, this casts the Musk anecdotes in a different light. Isaacson tells a story in the book about Musk flying to Mexico for his sister-in-law\u2019s birthday party. Grimes is DJing. His family and close friends are all there. But Musk doesn\u2019t leave his room. He plays Polytopia all night instead.
Isaacson treats this as evidence of Musk as a deft, dynamic strategic thinker who has trouble taking pleasure in normal-people things. Isaacson never clocks that this means he must have played a half-dozen games o
