History Bucket List

Haile Selassie's court told by its servants; Kapuscinski on power anywhere.

Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.

Three daughters of China: a warlord's concubine, a communist official and the author, through Mao's century.

Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.

Kapuscinski's forty years reporting Africa, from Ghana's independence to Rwanda.

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

Annie Ernaux's life from 1941 to 2006 as a collective French memory in the third person; her Nobel.

A man learns he came to Wales on the Kindertransport and follows the trail back; Sebald with photographs.

Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.

Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.

Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.

Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.

Expansion 11 puts historic wonders on the map, each one with a rule of its own.

The gateway wargame: the whole of the Second World War on one board.

A hidden-role parliament game about failing to spot a fascist in time.

No dice, no cards; just seven players lying to each other about 1901 Europe.

Viking Tetris: fill your board with goods, raid, and settle Greenland.

Renaissance patronage, dice-driven and unforgiving of a bad round.

A civilisation game in cards, from bronze tools to space flight, without the six-hour map.

Ten ages of technology in cards, with combos that rewrite the rules mid-game.

The original industrial-revolution canal-and-rail game, meaner than its Birmingham sequel.

The Cold War duel in cards, one card able to lose you the game.

The 2000 original: a board-game Japan on the campaign map and thousands of ashigaru on the battlefield.

Four campaigns following one commander from the Italian campaign to Waterloo.

Europe from 1087, with a Pope who excommunicates you and crusades to send the troublemakers on.

Gunpowder, home cities and the colonial era; the awkward middle child of the series.

China in 190 AD, with generals who hold grudges; the best-written Total War.

Crusades, gunpowder and the fan mods that keep it alive twenty years on.

The eighteenth century with line infantry and naval battles you command yourself.

Settle the New World, build an economy and declare independence from the king you serve.