The days are long and hot. Naturally, I sit in the depths of my room outfitted with blackout curtains that keep my frail skin shielded from the mild Midwestern sun outside. I find myself hours deep in a game of Stellaris. I am the immortal emperor of the Driesse Imperium, puppeting a despotic regime from the shadows and steering them toward war. The (digital) year is 2356, and my grand fleet is finally finished constructing.

In the years after it was founded in 1999, the Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive quietly built a reputation for developing some of the best, and most hardcore, strategy games on the market. "Deep, endless, complex, unyielding games," is how Shams Jorjani, the company's chief business development officer, describes Paradox's offerings. Most of its biggest hits, such as the middle ages-themed Crusader Kings, or Sengoku, in which you play as a 16th-century Japanese noble, were loosely based on history. But in 2016, Paradox decided to try something a little different. Its new game, Stellaris, was a work of sprawling science fiction, set 200 years in the future. In this virtual universe, players could explore richly detailed galaxies, command their own fusion-powered starship fleets and fight with extraterrestrials to expand their space empires. Gamers could choose to play as the human race, or one of many alien species. Another type of alien is a sentient crystal that eats rocks.) The game was an instant hit, selling more than 200,000 copies in its first 24 hours. Later that year, Paradox decided to take Stellaris to China. This would mean navigating the country's notoriously tricky censorship rules, but given that China was, at the time, home to an estimated 560 million gamers, the commercial appeal was irresistible. Paradox had been burned in China before.

Stellaris is the best flawed game I played in 2016. There was so much potential in Paradox's spacefaring grand strategy game, whether you were looking for Star Trek or Star Wars or Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica or some other science fiction icon. Stellaris had the seeds of all of them. Every system felt a bit underdeveloped, and the late-game especially became a chore--there wasn't enough to do, nor anything to really see. The galaxy discovered, your neighboring empires entrenched, your own empire consolidated.

In the year 2206, humanity left Earth. At least, some humans did. A selection of our civilization's best and brightest piled into a great big colony ship bound for the stars--for the brightest star system in Earth's sky, Sirius. A mere 8.6 light years from Earth, it was essentially like visiting an estranged neighbor. And yet it was a momentous occasion for the self-styled United Federation of Planets, now a burgeoning empire of two worlds.