One of my readers wrote me with a question about playing games offline, and as I am very much online all the time I'm not in the best position to answer it. So I'm passing the question on, and maybe you can help. The question is from somebody deployed overseas without commercial internet access: What good strategy and roleplaying games are there which do not require any internet connection, neither for installation, nor for playing? Thus the game needs to be available "in a box", and not require internet authentication for installation or playing.

Obviously multiplayer games are out. But even games like Diablo 3, or games requiring Steam or Origin for authentication are out. I remember a lot of uproar on online authentication for Ubisoft games, but I'm not 100% sure whether that is still the case for all of their games, or whether they changed that policy. I probably have several games which require online authentication, and I'm not even aware of it, because my computer is always online anyway. Unless authentication servers are down frequently (/wave Blizzard), I tend to not notice. But I freely admit that I am in a somewhat privileged situation there, and there are a lot of people which do not have unrestricted internet access.

So, which games would you recommend for taking on a lonely island or similar region without internet?