#tactical games

[158590]

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hey! I really love your recommendations— I’m just now getting into Ironsworn as a solo game from one of your posts. I was wondering, and I know this is a difficult and maybe weird ask, but do you know any solo rpgs that have good tactical combat? I enjoy narrative systems a lot, but my biggest passion is getting deep into tactics and strategy. I can’t even imagine how a solo game could get much more tactical than Ironsworn is, but if there are any out there I’d really love to try them out.

THEME: Solo Tactical Games

Hello, thank you so much for the lovely compliment! Let’s see if I can find anything for you.

EZCARGOT, by Garlickatsu.

"The surface has been lost. What remains is a gray, featureless and foggy wasteland. Dangerous, unidentifiable Entities roam free. Humanity lives in Rifts that keep them safe from Entites. These Rifts are kept open using a highly volatile resource called Anomaly. You pilot an EZ.CARGO.Trailer to transport one chunk of stable Anomaly between Rifts. Scan for the route ahead. Protect the Anomaly. Make it to your next destination alive."

EZCARGOT is more of an exploration game than it is a combat game, but the fact that you’re protecting an Anomaly makes combat feel necessary, even if it’s just a necessary part. That being said, the building and maintenance of your EZCARGOT vehicle is definitely at the centre of this game. This vehicle has compartments for various purposes; generating energy, firing weapons, carrying the Anomaly, and more.

On top of maintaining the EZCARGOT and protecting your precious cargo, there is the hazard of the land you must travel to get from rift to rift. If you want a game that’s weird, futuristic and dangerous, you might like EZCARGOT.

Delve to Earn Dimes, by flumpledev.

The surface world became uninhabitable for most people long ago. Not due to any cataclysm or war, but due to low wages.

In this solo journaling TTRPG you play as a crew of career dungeon delvers who are able to afford to live on the surface- as long as you spend most of your time surviving inside the dungeon. With a blackjack resolution mechanic you will need to weigh risk and reward, survival and honor in The Undercity.

A deck-of-cards dungeon delve, this game gives you a crew of characters to manage, rather than just one. Each member has different skills, attached to the four suits of your deck of cards. These cards also double as encounter generators, creating obstacles and enemies as you move down each floor of your dungeon.

Each day of in-game time, you will have an encounter. I suspect many of these encounters will be combat focused, since in most case you’ll have to decide whether you press on and deal with the encounter, or flee. You’ll also have a boss to defeat on each floor in order to keep moving onward - and a juicy reward after each boss fight that gives you the feeling of levelling up.

Hollow Hike, by RollForThings.

Hollow Hike is a short Dark Souls-inspired RPG about travelling a blighted land as a deathless Hollow, repeatedly dying and reviving against difficult foes, discovering the secrets of a lost kingdom, and slaying the Ashen Lords along the way. Hollow Hike is designed for a one-player experience, but can optionally be played with a GM for a duet game.

If you like gritty combat, you’ll probably like Hollow Hike. Similar to plenty of traditional fantasy games, you have a level and a class, and similar to Dark Souls, you need to collect souls to level up. If you die, you drop all of the souls you’ve collected up until then, and you’ll have to reach the same point in order to pick them back up - if you’ve played Bloodborne, this is probably familiar to you!

One of the ways the game is challenging is in the single-use nature of your items. You can use them to give yourself slight advantages in combat, but once you use them, they’re gone. However, I think the highlight of this game is the bosses on each level. They’re the doors to a new realm when they are defeated, and if they are an Ashen Lord, they’re extra special - they bring you one step closer to a true escape.

Factory of the Machine God, by Anthony Hobday.

A solo pen-and-paper tactical mech combat game.

An AI virus has uploaded itself to Mech Factory 12 [North Sea]. It has named itself “The Machine God.” We cannot send autonomous mechs against it. You will be airlifted to the factory. Go to the 5th floor and shut down the server. Clean-up crews will land on your all-clear.

This feels very much like an old-school rpg, with levels of the factory to work through, 6 skills, and various module spaces with which you can build your mech. Because you’re building your ideal war-machine, I think character creation alone can make this game tactical, but of course you’ll also have to battle various enemies as you try to get closer and closer to the final boss. The game also comes with an order of operations for enemies to act, which makes it easier for you to plan ahead and try and make the most of what you have.

Factory of the Machine God is rather minimalist in presentation, but I think it has a really strong concept as its base conceit, and I think it’s worth checking out all the same.

My Spoons are Stabby!, by Caramel Sugarevil.

Welcome to My Spoons are Stabby, a solo roguelike game where you’re dungeon crawling through your mind and dealing with the monsters you find there. The best weapon in the Monster Hunter’s arsenal is their mind, so we developed The Chaos Machine, the holodeck that mentally links to the Hunt Team. Through that, they can work through their issues individually or as a team. 

My Spoons are Stabby uses a deck of cards for task resolution, and your character has four stats that correspond to each card suit. You play by drawing cards from a draw pile and placing them into a daily spread of 6.

Your primary resource is called “Spoons”, which are required to do most things. If you run out of spoons too soon, you can take a wound or use up resources, but both are limited - and if you get 5 wounds, you lose the game.

The genre of the game feels a bit like urban fantasy. Each card you draw introduces various complications and monsters, many of which have special rules about how to deal with that day’s specific problem.

If you want a game that’s a strong metaphor and feels a little bit like a pick-your-own adventure with a few extra pieces to manage, you might like My Spoons are Stabby.

Welcome to the Dungeon, by wym_lawson.

You are the overseer of the realm of darkness, the supreme ruler of all monsters, known to the humans as The-Tainted-One. Despite these grand titles and immense responsibilities, you just want to live a quiet, peaceful life with your skeleton friends and pet slimes. But why do the humans find the need to invade your domain, seeking to destroy you and disrupt your peace?

Fine. If they insist on war, you will give them just that. In Welcome to the Dungeon, you play as the Dark Lord. Your goal is to build a dungeon filled with traps and monsters to thwart these pesky Heroes. Each victory against these intruders earns you resources, enabling you to enhance and expand your dungeon. Hopefully, you will be prepared to face the ultimate adventuring party led by the Chosen One.

I think Welcome to the Dungeon is kind of a tactical combat, but most of the tactics happen before any of the combat starts You create a dungeon with a certain number of points; the more points used, the higher the level of the dungeon. Apart from rooms, you’ll also need to create traps and Monsters - if you’re familiar with Boss Monster the boardgame, I think it feels slightly like that.

You’re also going to building the Heroes, which are the foes that you pit your dungeon against. These heroes have levels, just like your dungeon, but they also have classes, special reactions, and traits that will make defeating them difficult. If you defeat them, you get more points! Perhaps you can use those to make your dungeons even deadlier on your second play!

First Monarch, by Mundos Infinitos.

After THE FALL, We conceive the perfect MONARCHS And they, released their CRIMSON MIST. Many became SPECTERS, cities crumbled. Some survived, underground. The GUARDIAN has found her CHOSEN, With the duty of defeating the… FIRST MONARCH

The creator behind Mundos Infinitos is very good at packaging a whole experience in just a few pages. One page of First Monarch is full of oracles, generators that make your adventure unpredictable. Another page is dedicated to character details and special abilities; including a Bloodlust track that fills every time you turn a failure into a victory.

You play two characters in First Monarch, rather than one: a Chosen and a Guardian. The Chosen is the character with special abilities, but the Guardian has a special dice that can be used to lend you her aid in certain circumstances. She can also give you her blood to reduce your Bloodlust.

All in all, a lot of flavour in a very small package.

Other Posts To Look At

Not all of the games in these posts will be tactical, but these are the recommendation posts that I think are most likely to have tactical games.

Solo Showdowns Recommendation Post

Chrono Trigger / FFVI Solo Games

Solo Knights

Also Consider…

Godspark, by M.Allen Hall.

The Void series from ParaMyth Games.

[zestysthoughts]

Tep Tons: Video Games (2024)

10: Minecraft Legitimately, a great game. Every now and then I'll return to it and it's just a good time, the grind can get pretty monotonous though. Best horror experience, would get annihilated by the Warden again.

9: Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus Everything I'd want from an RPG, and exactly what I'm looking for in a tactics game. Unfortunately pacing is really sluggish, in part because the controls and activations are kinda clunky. I'm excited for the sequel! Would replace my flesh with machine again.

8. 140 A short and sweet indie game. An abstract musical platformer with boss fights and a bumpin' soundtrack. Unfortunately Carlsen Games doesn't seem to have made any more games after this and Thoth. Would get slapped by giant blocks of static again.

7. Saints Row: The Third Few games have given me as much joyous mirth as this. It's one of those franchises where if you took elements from every game and mashed them into one, you'd have a perfect game. Would use the Penetrator again.

6. Redout 2 An improvement over the original in almost every way. The butt-clenching speed, the satisfying weight of the ships, the extensive customization, this is probably the game I'm most skilled at. The campaign is overlong and the music isn't quite as iconic as the first though. Would blow up from overheating again.

5. Portal 1 and 2 It's a twofer! Both are a delight. They're funny, spooky, clever, haunting, beautiful games. Unfortunately I haven't been able to fully experience the co-op, where apparently some real juicy puzzles are at. Would break the Aerial Faith Plates again.

4. Warframe A great game getting better and better with every update. I love the world, the story, the gameplay, the weapons, even Duviri! Probably #2 in the amount of time I've put into it. Unfortunately this is the game that killed any interest in game grinding I might've had. Would breathe Vay Hek's air again.

3. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild The first LoZ game I'd actually played, and it was so delightful! It's a cozy world I found a lot of peace and relaxation in, even the combat was pleasing. Unfortunately while TotK expanded on it mechanically, it may as well have retconned everything else for the amount of impact BotW had on it. Would hunt Lynels again.

2. Starcraft 2 My favorite game of all time. I've been in love with this world since I was a wee lad, and my teens were dominated by SC2. Definitely the game I've sunk the most time into, especially co-op and campaigns. The gameplay is buttery smooth, and I'm terrible at it lol. Unfortunately you can see the campaign was too ambitious for the time/funding they were allowed, so the quality of animation, writing, and production take some dips, as well as some of the content added toward the end of development. Still, one of the only games to make me cry even today. Would give my life for Aiur again.

1. Undertale Again, legitimately a great game, the greatest game of all time. No meme, I adore this game and my favorite character unironically is Sans. I love a character with an otherworldly understanding of what's going on. It's been dissected to death so I won't harp on it, just know that everything about it is wonderful. Hot take though, Megalovania is totally overrated. Would eat the spaghetti again.

[sweetsandmemes]

Was listening to Warrior of the Mind and it just reminded me Fire Emblem or Persona.

So I would like to think Athena, as in the goddess, would play those types of games. So that’s my headcanon for a Greek goddess.

[indiexpo]

How I Conquered your Planet - Official Trailer

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[dlspike]

Tactical games

[fogaminghub]

🌟 Hey, fellow gamers! 🐴 Ready to conquer "Preaching Forgiveness as He Went" in Red Dead Redemption 2? Check out our detailed guide to unlock strategies and Gold Medal requirements! 💥

Don't miss your chance to dominate the mission and get the Bolt Action Rifle! 

[accecakes]

It’s a darn gosh shame 😞

SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!

[yellowwwcrayon]

Gihun - me and the bad bitch I pulled by being so pathetic and incompetent that they had to take pity on me

(if I had a nickel for every time an intelligent ruthless character fell for this dumb/cute himbo man child (and sad sweaty meow meow), I'd have two nickels? Not a lot, but still weird that it happened twice in one show.)

[ordosmarkzero]

The Banner Saga

[riza-hawks-eye]

Matching Outfits You Say???????

[nokikissa]

Couple low quality Darrell gifs I made for funsies :3

[acquired-stardust]

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Gameboy Advance 2003

[kyl3dawolf]

fallout tactics, 2001

[wickworks]

Lancer Tactics dialogue layout crisis of faith

(from this month's backer update)

Every so often, I'll run into something in development that eats away at me until it pushes me to a crisis of faith and I have a breakdown, burn down a bunch of work, and build something better from the ashes. These are moments of transformation and we're almost always able to come out the other side with something much better than what we started with.

This all sounds very dramatic until you take a step back and see the issue in question is just, like, the layout of a menu. But if medieval priests were able to have schisms over angels on pins I can have strong feelings about graphic design, dammit!

This month's episode revolved around how we're doing character dialogue. For reference the plan was to do a standard 4-slot visual-novel talking heads layout. I call it a 4-slot because there's usually four positions that characters can stand; two on the left, two on the right:

I had it ingame, and it was working. But... something felt off. Do you see the difference between every one of the above examples and this?

It's all about perspective, baby.

Answer: all the character art in those examples are drawn at a slight angle so they can be flipped back and forth to be made like they're looking at each other.

Trying to do this with the perspective we chose early — straight on — makes for a chorus line of weirdos who are looking directly into your soul as they ostensibly chat with each other. Credulity is strained; the illusion of these puppets interacting in the same space is paper-thin.

(I was skeptical of choosing this perspective for this reason, but we ultimately went with it to make the customizable assets in the portrait maker easier to fit together)

We tried a bunch of different layouts, but they all at least one of these problems:

they'd stare into your soul while ostensibly directing comments elsewhere.

they felt like text messages; this would be fine if that's what we were going for, but we wanted something that could represent face-to-face conversations. (Tactical Breach Wizards was able to pull this style off because they had little 3D dioramas to go along with it)

or, most damning of all, they felt like zoom calls.

So, my heart aflutter and spirit in want, I spent a day doing a research dive into various dialogue layouts (bless the Game UI Database!) to see if any other games had managed to pull this character art perspective off. I ended up with this massive non-chronological taxonomic tree:

(fullsize here)

The type of layout that particularly caught my eye was this style where each character had their own little box. These layouts borrow a concept from comic books called "closure" where the space and time between characters are left blank. Freed from the constraints of trying to simulate a single space, these layouts allow the reader to fill in the blanks with something that feels more true-to-life than anything we'd be able to render ourselves.

I was especially impressed with the dynamism of Tales of Symphonia and The World Ends With You; rather than sticking to single slots they would animate the entire panels moving around to indicate motion an relative position of characters.

So we threw out the old code and copied them. Here's what we've come up with:

We'll be able to have portraits interact, like smacking each other (I felt like a kid hitting two action figures together, lol)

We can also apply effects like princess-leia-holograms and full-screen "lighting" effects like warning banners:

Carpenter and I came up with a number of arrangements that the portraits can smoothly transition between:

I've also implemented support for choices during a dialogue, potentially leading to branching paths.

Overall, I feel SO much better about this system than our initial designs. It might feel a little more cartoony, but I think we're making a cartoony game so that's not a problem.

Whew. We bit a lot off to chew with this project. I feel like I just made a second visual novel game engine inside of the first. Fingers crossed that it all ends up worth it.

[childofthestone]

hot take but the fourth installment of a series should not be accessible to newcomers