A friend just introduced me to awbw a few weeks ago. I don’t think it’s new, but I had no idea it was out there.
awbw is to Advance Wars as Pokemon Showdown is to Pokemon. It’s a free web simulation of the mechanics, designed to make it easy to enjoy the multiplayer.
It has the COs, units, and map elements of the GBA and DS games. AFAIK most of the maps themselves are user made. COs are split into tiers, because (unsurprisingly), some are significantly advantaged over others.
You can play simultaneously, but there’s an apparent emphasis on async matches.
So yeah, just sharing in cases other people who might be interested weren’t aware of this.
Is this a multiplayer only game or is there also singleplayer? Very cool BTW!
It’s multiplayer only. They have some stuff in their FAQ about how playing vs AI is pretty different and potentially forms bad habits.
But I’d have to imagine part of it is they want to avoid any appearance of competing with the actual AW games that Nintendo sells. The focus on multiplayer makes it a very different thing from the cartridges imo.
It’s a little overwhelming tho, given I’d never played vs humans before. Enjoyed vs my buddy, but against random people I’ve mostly gotten crushed.
If anyone here wants to run some casuals, I’d be down.
Very cool! Thank you for the extra details. That makes sense.
I played a little multiplayer of the first DS game back when. I think I played a few matches with a buddy of mine, but then we played a three-way with another friend and that game just never ended! Just as it was looking bad for one of us, we’d come right back on our turn. I don’t know how that would have wrapped up.
That was my experience too. Just a slog. AW wasn’t really designed for PvP imo. Attempts at “balancing” just make it less fun. Days of Ruin really drove that home for me… not surprised the series died out after that. And nothing else has really scratched that itch since. Wargroove came close, but the design leaned towards multiplayer from the start. Balance patches etc. And the dev response towards complaints about poor enemy AI was always “play a human.” Which… turned into a slog.
