Headquarters: World War II - Ardennes

My first instinct when I loaded this up was to check how deep the stat sheet goes, and honestly it surprised me. Kyiv-based Starni Games pitches Headquarters: World War II as accessible, and the tutorial backs that claim up, walking new players through the core loop without padding it with filler lessons. Strategy veterans can skip it entirely and land on their feet. The square-grid battlefield, rather than the hex maps Starni used in their Strategic Mind series, makes facing decisions and armor-angle math immediately readable. You always know which side of that Panzer you are hitting, and that clarity has real mechanical weight because front, side, back, and top armor values all differ, so positioning a Sherman to catch a Tiger in the flank is a genuine win condition, not a lucky roll. The three campaigns cover the Battle of Normandy from D-Day through the closing of the Falaise Pocket, with nine operations each for the US, UK, and German factions. Yes, Normandy again. The setting fatigue is real, and reviewers have noted it, but the faction asymmetry partially compensates. The US leans on armored pushes, the UK on infantry and commando units, while the German campaign reverses the objective logic of the other two and forces a defensive mindset. Between missions you upgrade units, assign hero characters for unique abilities, and manage crew attrition, because losing your gunner cuts your attacks per turn and losing your driver cuts movement, so the spreadsheet lives inside the unit card rather than on a separate army screen. That is a smart compression of complexity. Command abilities, including airstrikes and morale boosts, add a light ability layer without bloating the action economy. The overwatch and line-of-sight systems reward preparation over aggression. Setting up overlapping fields of fire in urban terrain, the strongest part of the game, turns a Norman village into a genuine tactical puzzle. Destructible buildings mean you can level a house to deny cover, and the high-ground mechanics add a vertical consideration that most genre entries ignore. Weather and time-of-day also shift the camo and spotting math, so a night assault plays very differently from a noon armor push. The cinematic shot system fires on every action, giving the game a film-strip feel that production reviewers compared favorably to the old Close Combat series. It is skippable in the options if you just want to push turns. Where the game stumbles is the AI and the skirmish mode. In campaign, the AI is described by multiple reviewers as competent enough to target your strongest assets and hold defensive lines. In skirmish, that same AI struggles to generate meaningful pressure, and the prestige-point economy turns matches into attrition grinds rather than tactical contests. Competitive players are better served looking elsewhere. The UI is functional but crowded, and skipping a cinematic can sometimes drop the camera into a position where you miss the combat feedback entirely. A built-in map editor exists and works, though the lack of Steam Workshop integration at launch was a common complaint, limiting community content discoverability. DLC has expanded the content, with Market Garden arriving post-launch and an Ardennes campaign adding more operations. The base game's 27 campaign missions and 6 skirmish maps provide a solid but not exhaustive package on their own. For the kind of player who wants a wargame they can finish a mission of in an evening without reading a 200-page manual, this sits in an underserved middle band. It is less demanding than Combat Mission or Graviteam, lighter on abstraction than Panzer Corps, and more tactically textured than most XCOM-likes that borrow the unit-level format. If you have never touched a Slitherine title, this is a low-friction entry point that still has enough angle-of-attack thinking and crew management to satisfy the obsessive side of the hobby. Just go in knowing the skirmish AI will not test you, and that the Normandy backdrop offers nothing you have not seen before historically.

Alex · Scout Team

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