When I was a student at university in the early 1990s, we had a lot of Pluses & SEs as well as LCs.
My standard apps & games that I ran on the compact macs then were:
a. SuperPaint 1.5
b. PageMaker 3.5
c. Word 4.0, MacWrite 5.0, MacWrite II
d. MacDraw, MacDraw II
e. Excel 2.1 & CricketGraph (I was a science student)
f. FileMaker Pro 2.1
g. Games: Tetris, Prince of Persia, NetTrek (networkable!) but, oddly enough, not Armor Alley (I prefered the colour LCs).
h. Others used Microsoft Works / ClarisWorks for everything but I never really liked them.
Civ. I is manageable on an SE with 4MB RAM but scrolling around a B&W screen is not fun. The maps are massive. Civ. I really needs a colour mac with as big a screen as it can support. An IIcx with a graphics card running 1024x768 is not at all bad.