The reality is too much to take. Your skull feels like it’s two sizes too small for your brain. Waves of nausea are rocking your body like a catamaran that lost its sail in the middle of the Bermuda triangle. And that smell. Man, that smell. Healthy grown adults simply shouldn’t be capable of producing stinks like that – from either end of their body.
Self-imposed quarantine is the only answer. After all, it was making contact with other humans that got you into this mess. Those idiot friends of yours, they were the ones who forced you to go swimming in beer, then shudder back a bunch of shots before using Jägerbombs to keep the sick-inducing games going ‘til 3am. Damn them all.
Genghis Khan – he could be the one to teach them a lesson. Or maybe Montezuma. At this point it doesn’t really matter. Either could bring you the nuclear weapons you need to eradicate the majority of the world’s population. Right now, that feels like the most measured response to the pain and misery that’s been inflicted on you. They will pay.
The earlier Civs' visuals are perhaps easier on the hungover head.
It doesn’t matter that it might take all day. You’ve already cleared everything else in your schedule that wasn’t compatible with sitting in your underwear, passing wind and eating microwavable pizza. The only thing to do now is fire up your favoured version of Civilization and relax as you become ruler of the world in the most brutish and violent way possible.
Under normal circumstances you might try to be a fairly enlightened world leader. You’d build a society based on egalitarian principles, that valued science over ideology, and which would spend its money building a sophisticated cultural landscape for the whole world to enjoy. But not today.
Today it’s about slavery. Today you’ll run a fundamentalist regime that’s happiest when its citizens are working themselves into early graves. Today, all those who live within your borders will exist for one sole purpose: to help the expansion of an evil war machine.
Explosions make everything better.
Your weakest neighbours will be crushed. Their cities will be burnt to the ground or, if you’re feeling unusually merciful, turned into another factory of war for your expanding empire. Admittedly alliances might have to be made with the not-quite-so-weak, but even if the notion of friendship grates on you now, you can relax in the knowledge that it will only make betraying them feel all the sweeter in the end.
Aww, poor Ghandi! He decided to leave the border of his wealthy empire scantly defended, and rely on your centuries-old defensive pact, but now you’re left with no choice but to teach him the price of his ideological naivety. Sorry, Ghandi!
By the time you’ve reached the 20th Century, the tentacles of your fascist state will have spread all over the globe. A few independent nations might remain, but you’ve only left them standing so you have someone outside your own borders to bully and torture. Ghandi’s still there – but with 95 per cent of his empire in ruins and cowering in a mud hut in Delhi, he’s started to see things your way. Suddenly he’s only too happy to help you research your weapons of mass destruction – and hell, you might even allow yourself a little smile as you observe how quickly the wimp was willing to abandon his principles to save his skin and his now-utterly-impoverished people.
Yeah, that'll do it.
It won’t do him much good though. Although from here you could win the game in a number of different ways – some of them in fact much quicker and easier than the world domination route – you won’t let people say that you’ve mellowed in your old age. The diplomatic or scientific options are completely out of the question. Long ago, you decided that Delhi would be the first test of your nuclear power following completion of the Manhatten Project. And the best part is, even when you make clear to Gandhi that this is your plan, he’ll go along with you just to try to maintain a couple more turns of peace.
The fool. Nothing now can prevent nuclear Armageddon and the triumph of your uniquely effective form of fascism across the globe. Delhi is obliterated, Gandhi executed as a traitor, and most impressively, your mother of all hangovers has passed.
So. How about a toast to the victor?
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