Siege Lords

Siege Lords is a turn-based tactics game played on a hand-painted hex map that looks like a war table someone has been leaning over all afternoon. There is forest and hill country, farmland and roads, a river crossed at a ford or a bridge, and a walled castle at the heart of it, with chunky painted tokens carrying blue and crimson banners pushed about on top. Six of them do the fighting: knights who are hard to shift, archers who reach two hexes and three from a hilltop, pikemen who brace against horsemen, cavalry that covers five hexes and cuts archers down, catapults that throw three hexes but cannot move and fire in the same turn, and healers who mend whatever stands next to them.

Everything on the board answers to something else. Pikemen hold off cavalry, cavalry ride down archers, archers pick pikemen apart, and knights soak up all of it. The ground counts too: forest thickens a defence, a hill lets your archers shoot further, ramparts make the castle a hard thing to take, roads are quick going, and the river will not let anyone across except at the ford or the bridge. Step beside an enemy and its zone of control stops you dead where you stand. Catch a unit with enemies on two sides and the flank does extra damage, and any unit knocked below a third of its health loses its nerve and falls back a hex.

Nothing is hidden from you. Tap a unit and the hexes it can reach light up along with every enemy it can hit and the exact damage it would do, and you can undo your last move right up until you attack; End Turn hands the board over. Twelve hand-authored scenarios ask for different things — wipe out the other side, hold the castle for a set number of turns, walk a wagon safely to the bridge, capture the banner, break a siege — and stars come down to how few turns you took and how few units you lost, with your progress kept in the browser. There is a skirmish mode on four maps against the computer at Easy, Normal or Sharp, and hot-seat two-player on one device. Play with touch, mouse or keyboard: arrows pan the map, Tab cycles through your units, Enter confirms, Backspace undoes, E ends the turn, P pauses and M mutes.