Advance Wars

Advance Wars grew out of the much older Japanese Famicom Wars series, running on Nintendo hardware since 1988, but for players outside Japan the real story begins in 2003, when the first Game Boy Advance entry reached Europe. The game pairs deliberately cartoonish, chibi-style commanding officers (COs) with a hard core of turn-based tactics on a grid map: infantry, tanks, artillery, aircraft and ships each have their strengths and weaknesses, terrain shapes both defense and movement, and every CO brings passive bonuses plus a one-off super power that can turn a battle around. Its single-player campaign came with a map editor and the option to face another player over a link cable.

The sequel, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising (2003), added new commanding officers and expanded the campaign around the rebellious Black Hole faction, while Dual Strike (2005) on the Nintendo DS used the system's two screens to let players command two COs at once and introduced new units such as mine-clearing vehicles. The sharpest turn came with 2008's Days of Ruin (Dark Conflict in Europe): a grimmer, near-apocalyptic story set after a natural disaster, an entirely new cast instead of recycled faces from earlier games, and rawer visuals split fans used to the series' light tone, though critics praised the deeper systems and more careful unit balance underneath.

The series then went quiet for years before returning in 2023 with the Switch remaster Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, whose release Nintendo pushed back by a few months out of sensitivity to real-world events. Its clean, approachable turn-based formula has since become a genre reference point, inspiring independent titles such as Wargroove, and thanks to its simple rules and legible graphics Advance Wars remains a frequently recommended entry point into turn-based war strategy for players who might otherwise be put off by denser, more complex simulations.