The Ultimate List of Mind-Boggling and Challenging Management Games

Highlights

Management games offer long, strategic experiences with a focus on gameplay over graphics, providing a complex and immersive gaming experience.

The management games featured encompass various themes, such as coaching e-sports teams, building cities, managing sports, constructing prisons, and overseeing space colonies. These games challenge players to handle multiple responsibilities, including resource management, infrastructure development, logistics, and meeting the needs of citizens or team members. As a result, they offer a rewarding and demanding experience for fans of this genre.

If you enjoy engaging in intricate and strategic gameplay that involves multitasking, and don't mind games that prioritize gameplay over graphics, then management games are a genre worth exploring. This list offers a diverse selection of complex management games, ranging from colony simulators and city-builders to sports team management.

10 Teamfight Manager

Players of this simulation game are challenged to coach an e-sports team. They must effectively manage their players, strategically select and ban champions for each match, and balance the individual strengths and weaknesses of the team members and champions.

Teamfight Manager provides players with a multitude of tasks to handle. They must train and recruit players, strategically utilize their abilities during auto-battler style combat, and effectively manage their equipment. The game offers a wealth of strategic elements and also allows for online PvP, enabling players to participate in leagues with a maximum of ten other players.

9 Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines is a modern and advanced city-building game that offers players a unique and intricate simulation. With various elements to manage, players are tasked with ensuring their city meets essential needs such as education, water, electricity, emergency services, and healthcare. Balancing these requirements requires careful planning and effort.

In addition to the basic necessities, players must also maintain a stable economy, address the demands of their citizens, optimize traffic flow, oversee different districts, and implement effective policies to maintain order in the city.

8 Tropico 6

Tropico 6, belonging to a franchise with a rich history, successfully lives up to the high expectations of its dedicated fan base. In this game, players assume the role of leaders of an island state and are tasked with guiding their people through four distinct eras.

One of the highlights of Tropico 6 is the ability to manage multiple islands within an archipelago, linking them together and efficiently overseeing transportation to maintain control over their territory. The main focus lies in effectively managing infrastructure and logistics, while also steering the inhabitants towards specific goals. The game offers players unparalleled freedom, but with such a wide array of choices, it also presents a satisfying level of complexity.

7 Football Manager

The latest installment of this franchise, Football Manager 2023, is a top-notch choice for both franchise enthusiasts and management game fans, especially those who love football/soccer.

In Football Manager, players are tasked with selecting a club, assembling a team, and overseeing the backroom staff. Success relies on meticulously building and implementing effective strategies. Moreover, the game offers a "Supporter Confidence" system for fan engagement and introduces AI managers that escalate the game's difficulty as players advance.

6 Prison Architect

Players can use this management game to create and build their own prison, overseeing the finances and economy, while dealing with a diverse range of prisoners, each with varying levels of danger.

In Prison Architect, players must strategically plan their prison, including various facilities, cell blocks, and policies. Effective management of staff, contraband control, and maintaining a strict daily schedule for prisoners is crucial to maintaining control and avoiding potential riots. Though easy to control and play, Prison Architect offers a profound and intricate experience, with intricate systems and unpredictable prisoners, making it challenging to become a master.

5 Oxygen Not Included

This space simulation game by Klei Entertainment challenges players to oversee an underground asteroid colony. The objective is to conduct research, manage the strengths and weaknesses of colonists, and construct a colony tailored to their needs.

What sets Oxygen Not Included apart is its unique and intricate resource management system. Players must manufacture and maintain essential resources such as limited oxygen, water, food, and power. To prevent suffocation or starvation, players must employ innovative techniques to recycle resources and guarantee the survival of their colony. While Oxygen Not Included offers a gratifying experience, its complexity can be uncompromising.

4 RimWorld

RimWorld is a complex colony management and simulation game that offers various AI "storytellers" to modify gameplay, simulated psychology, relationship systems, combat, climates, and procedurally generated worlds, factions, and diplomacy. Players must constantly juggle multiple tasks, such as carefully planning and managing resources, defending against raiders, maintaining colonists' sanity, and preventing starvation and death. Even without DLCs, RimWorld is challenging, but those who are willing to navigate its intended difficulty and storytellers can find immense satisfaction in mastering its intricate systems.

3 Amazing Cultivation Simulator

Just like RimWorld, Amazing Cultivation Simulator allows players to oversee a colony and fulfill the various needs of its inhabitants while also safeguarding it against threats. However, what sets Amazing Cultivation Simulator apart is its foundation in Chinese mythology. Players are tasked with establishing a sect of disciples, delving into the research and cultivation of supernatural powers, and optimizing their colony's Feng Shui.

Similar to RimWorld, players in Amazing Cultivation Simulator will engage in activities such as mining, construction, recruitment, research, combatting enemies and resolving events, gathering equipment, and managing the priorities of their colonists in order to establish an efficient and sustainable colony.

2 OpenTTD

OpenTTD is an open-source recreation of the popular 1995 game Transport Tycoon Deluxe by Chris Sawyer. It is a business simulation game where players aim to maximize profits through transporting passengers and cargo using various modes of transportation, including roads, railways, waterways, and airways.

In OpenTTD, players will strategize and build their transport empire by efficiently managing infrastructure and logistics on a randomly generated map. They must carefully construct networks that overcome obstacles such as city streets, bodies of water, and mountains, in order to create the most efficient transportation systems possible. The game offers online cooperative gameplay, player versus player mode, and best of all, it is currently free to play.

1 Dwarf Fortress

This modern classic game, centered around dwarves, is a colony simulator that has undergone extensive development. It has achieved legendary status within the gaming community due to its vast scope. Dwarf Fortress is renowned for its emphasis on management, offering players a procedurally generated world and history.

In this game, players are tasked with the survival and well-being of their dwarves, as well as the construction of a fortress to defend against various creatures and rival factions. A comprehensive combat system adds to the complexity, allowing for the utilization of skills, equipment, and status effects. Balancing the happiness of the dwarves with the efficiency and survival of the colony is a challenging task within the unforgiving world of Dwarf Fortress.

Traditionally, Dwarf Fortress has been difficult to learn and aesthetically unappealing. However, its Steam version now includes pixel art and built-in music, along with several in-game tutorials to assist newcomers in getting started.