One of the frustrating things about Battle Brothers is the lack of tutorials. In fairness to me, I shouldn’t have to watch 40 minutes of YouTube voiceover before I’m ready to play. After healing and rearming, we’re exactly where we started: six men, no experience, no equipment. We loot corpses for meager, broken gear, then head back to get paid by the magistrate. Combat in Battle Brothers is what you get when Game of Thrones has a one-night stand with X-COM: turn-based, hexagonal, and everything looks noble until someone sews a dog’s head onto a corpse.Īt the end of the battle, I’ve lost three men and injured many more. In Battle Brothers, I've seen punctured lungs and men slowly beaten to death with clubs, their eyes going black with blood. I have never seen such brutal pixel-art violence. It’s cute until a spearman’s neck explodes from the force of an axe blow, his head rolling in a shower of arterial blood.

They march with triumphant hop-hop-hop motions, as if they’re counting spaces out loud in Monopoly. Soldiers look like bobbleheads, their oversized faces grimacing above pixel-art armor. Characters from both sides take turns moving and making attacks. In combat, the map screen dissolves into a hex-based battlefield dotted with trees and stones.

I took my company and new recruits and marched them into the teeth of a bandit ambush. Every choice-and there are a lot of choices to make-is an exercise in trade-offs, in choosing the least-bad option. Each weapon has special abilities, and each tactic has a potential counter-tactic: maces are weak, but good against armor heavy axes are very powerful, but slow.

Battle Brothers is a cleverly constructed, carefully balanced board game. Choosing which weapons to buy and outfitting the company is a much deeper strategic exercise than it looks.

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