Commands & Colors: The Great War

I keep a shortlist of hex-and-counter systems that genuinely model their historical period rather than just reskinning generic unit cards, and the Commands & Colors system by Richard Borg earns its place on that list. The Great War adaptation, brought to PC by HexWar Games, takes that pedigree and plants it squarely in the mud of the Western Front: 15 scenarios covering Loos, the Somme, and Vimy Ridge, with historically constrained deployments that force you to fight the terrain as much as the opponent. For a tactics player who cares about authenticity, that premise alone is worth sitting up for. The dual-deck system is where the design genuinely shines. Command cards activate units by section - left flank, center, right flank - meaning you can never just throw everything at the enemy at once. You are always rationing aggression, which maps convincingly onto the coordination failures that defined real trench warfare. Layered on top are Combat cards covering actions like Gas Attack, Trench Raid, and Advance Over The Top, each costing HQ tokens that you also need to call in Reserve Artillery. That resource tension - spend tokens on a card play now, or hold them for the artillery strike next turn - is the most interesting decision loop in the game, and it respects you enough not to explain it three times. The dice-based combat resolution keeps turns short, so a scenario rarely drags. Scale shifts scenario to scenario: sometimes a unit is a battalion, sometimes it is a handful of soldiers going over the wire, and the system handles both without feeling strained. Here is where I have to be straight with you about the port quality. Steam reviews sit at roughly 54 percent positive across a small sample, and the community complaints are specific: AI turn-lock bugs where the opponent simply stops taking its turn, and achievement tracking that does not fire correctly even after completing scenarios at the General difficulty level. No multiplayer to speak of either, which is a real problem for a design that was built around two human players reading each other across a table. HexWar has a pattern with their digital C&C conversions - the core rules translate faithfully, the polish around the edges does not. There is no mod ecosystem, no scenario editor, and no sign of additional content past launch. What you see at install is what you get, permanently. For newcomers to the Commands & Colors system, I want to make a case that this is actually a low-friction entry point - if you can tolerate the technical roughness. The card-driven activation means you never need to optimize a full-army build order on turn one. The 15 scenarios walk you through escalating complexity naturally, starting with small engagements before putting you in command of larger Somme-scale operations. The rules overhead is lighter than any Paradox title and lighter than most COIN games. If you have bounced off grand strategy because the first session felt like reading a manual, a 45-minute C&C scenario is a reasonable recalibration. Just go in knowing achievements may not register and save often to dodge the AI hang bug.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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