Wars of the Roses

My first honest reaction sitting down with Wars of the Roses by HexWar Games was: this is a digital wargame that trusts its historical setting to do the heavy lifting. That is both its strength and its ceiling. You get a tile-based, turn-by-turn tactical system spread across three main campaigns covering the Lancastrian, Yorkist, and Tudor phases of the conflict, plus a seven-mission tutorial block that actually earns its keep. HexWar's tutorial structure is one of the better things about this series overall, and newcomers to hex-and-counter wargaming will find the entry slope far gentler than, say, a Field of Glory title. Seven dedicated introductory missions give you enough reps with movement, line-of-sight, and flank positioning before the campaign AI starts punishing mistakes. If you've bounced off wargames before because the manual read like a military field manual, this one is worth another look. The unit roster runs to over 30 medieval types, which sounds generous. Knights, billmen, longbowmen, artillery, light infantry with their own pass-through movement rules - the palette is wide enough that you're making real choices about which formations to advance and in what order. Flank attack bonuses matter, and the detailed combat analysis readout after each engagement gives you enough numerical feedback to understand why a skirmish went wrong. That's the kind of transparency I want from a tactics game. The standout mechanical wrinkle specific to this setting is faction-switching: during certain engagements, units can defect mid-battle to mirror the historical treacheries of the period. It sounds gimmicky but it genuinely changes how you weight aggression versus holding ground in those scenarios. Here is where I have to be straight with both history enthusiasts and tactics veterans. Because the Wars of the Roses was fundamentally a civil war fought between two sides with near-identical equipment and doctrine, the game carries an inherent asymmetry problem - or rather, a lack of it. The unit pools on each side are very similar in capability, which flattens the strategic decision-making compared to HexWar titles set across broader cultural divides. The replay mode that lets you play each mission from the opposing side is a welcome addition, but it doesn't fully solve the problem that both rosters feel like slight reskins of the same force. Veterans of the developer's other offerings in the medieval and Hundred Years War space have noted this directly. On the presentation side, the font choices can make the UI harder to read than it should be, and the AI on larger maps historically took its time to complete turns - though patch notes indicate HexWar addressed execution speed over multiple updates. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of, and no multiplayer on the PC version. You are buying a self-contained single-player puzzle box with a fixed mission count across three campaigns. The question of whether that's enough content depends entirely on how much you enjoy combing the same engagements from both sides and pushing your efficiency on repeat runs. For the historical niche audience that cares specifically about Bosworth, Towton, or Hexham in tactical form, the value proposition is clear. For everyone else, I'd point to the developer's broader catalog first and treat this as a supplementary entry rather than an entry point.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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