Theatre Command

Theatre Command is a turn-based hex wargame. You command one nation and the AI commands the rest, and nobody waits their turn: every side writes its orders at the same time, and pressing Submit resolves all of them at once. An attack can land on a hex the enemy has just left.

It runs entirely on your phone: no account, no sign-up, no cloud, no server.

THE TURN

Give as many orders as you like, then submit. The turn plays back in order - air, then movement, then fighting - so you watch what your orders actually met rather than what you aimed at.

FIVE THEATRES, FOUR WAYS TO WIN

Coastal Urban, Arid Highland, River Delta, Mountain Frontier and Arctic Tundra, plus River Crossing, a twenty-turn skirmish. Each theatre is decided on its own terms: hold most of the map for several turns running, break the enemy by attrition, take three named objectives and keep them, or be ahead when the turns run out.

TEN UNITS ON NATO-STYLE COUNTERS

Infantry, mechanised infantry, armour, anti-tank infantry, artillery, reconnaissance, combat engineers, anti-air, attack helicopters and strike aircraft. The bar under a counter is what is left of it; the chevrons beside it are experience, and a veteran formation hits harder and holds longer. Units can share a hex and move as one, at the pace of the slowest. Terrain matters more than the numbers: attacking into forest or built-up ground is expensive, catching something in the open is not, and a unit that has just moved has not dug in.

SUPPLY IS WHAT LOSES CAMPAIGNS

Every unit needs a line of your own ground back to your capital or one of your works. Cut off, it fights and moves at about two thirds strength and stops healing. A deep advance down a thin corridor is the classic way to lose an army without a battle.

FOG OF WAR THAT REMEMBERS

You see what your units can see. An enemy you saw once and cannot see now is drawn as a hollow ghost, where it was rather than where it is.

AIRFIELDS

Squadrons live at an airfield, one of each type. Strike any hex in range, seen or not, and the sortie comes back with a look at what is there. Ferry a squadron to another of your airfields. A squadron with nothing to do goes up on patrol by itself.

THE STRATEGIC WEAPONS PROGRAMME

A hundred points, paid off at fifteen a turn and no faster, so you fund a warhead long before you can use one - and nothing launches before the theatre's own unlock turn. Aiming takes three deliberate steps, the last of which is typing LAUNCH. The hex it lands on is destroyed, everything beside it badly hurt, and fallout goes on killing there for ten turns. First use is condemned: thirty per cent off your production for ten turns, and any rival holding warheads of its own answers with one aimed at your capital. Guaranteed, not likely.

CAMPAIGN AND SANDBOX

Campaign plays the authored map, its victory condition and its turn limit. Sandbox deals the ground fresh every game and never ends.

Flat colour, hard edges and chunky counters: a late-1980s strategy game at modern resolution. War is abstract here - symbols on a hex grid, no people, no blood.

FREE, WITH ADS

A banner sits at the bottom during play. Full-screen ads appear only at deliberate breaks - the end of a battle, changing theatre or mode, surrendering - and after every third thing you buy on the Command screen. They never interrupt a turn resolving. One optional rewarded video makes the rest of the session ad-free, banner included. A second is offered after a defeat, to restart that theatre with a stronger opening force. There are no in-app purchases, and nothing is locked behind an ad. Where required, consent for personalised ads is handled through Google's User Messaging Platform.

YOUR PRIVACY

No account, no cloud, no sign-up, no online play. Your saved campaign and settings stay on your device. Advertising is the only thing that touches the network, and the app asks for no permission beyond it.

The first title from RetroVent - old-school games reinvented for the phone.