I got well past the initial hour mentioned in the blog, but after about the third hour or so my interest waned, it is pretty shallow and to an extent just feels like you are 'playing' a spreadsheet with the occasional random value thrown in.
I hope this doesn't sound too disparaging, since I did have fun for the four hours or so I played, but I wouldn't call it deep strategy at all, and I would have felt pretty let down if I'd paid full price for it.
I finally gave up and figured out that all copies on Steam's servers were bad (they had some AU/NZ server issues back then I believe), so with some hackery I downloaded a previous version.
I played it. It was great. But as the other commenter mentioned, it is pretty shallow. It's easy to "beat the game". The challenges come from one self though.
For example, to win the game in any country except US, the easiest course is to direct that country to be a socialist utopia. One of the challenges I set myself to win was to make it a religio-anarchy type of of government. That's when the game gets fun IMO.
Also, US is challenging no matter what your plans are.