Wargame Construction Set II - TANKS!

I remember sitting over little maps dotted with tank icons in the mid-90s, convincing myself this was educational software. Wargame Construction Set II: Tanks! from 1994 was exactly the type of game that looked as dry as a textbook but could swallow up an entire afternoon before you knew what hit you.

It's a turn-based war simulator focused — as the name suggests — on ground tank combat. The setting is primarily World War II, or conflicts of a similar nature. The game offered both pre-made scenarios and an editor where you could build your own battlefield, position units, and set victory conditions. That "Construction Set" in the title wasn't just marketing fluff — the editor was the real heart of the whole package.

Controls are purely keyboard and mouse, with an interface stripped down to the bare bones. You move units across a hexagonal grid, keeping an eye on firing range, terrain cover, fuel and ammo supplies. Nothing groundbreaking on paper, but in practice it works consistently. The AI won't surprise you, though it can put up a fight — especially when you stack the odds in the computer's favor. The real fun came from hotseat multiplayer against a live opponent on one keyboard, which at fourteen years old with a classmate on the couch was a perfectly legitimate way to spend a Friday night.

What's aged the worst is the complete lack of any visual polish. The graphics were sparse even in 1994 — unit icons, wireframe maps, minimal animation. Back then it didn't matter because you knew where the tanks were, where the trees were, and where the anti-tank ditch was. Today it demands a certain amount of goodwill from a new generation of players and a willingness to read the manual. Without the manual you couldn't even get started back then anyway. The editor remains a strong point — the idea of letting players build their own scenarios was still more exception than rule on PC in 1994, and it worked solidly here.

Today Tanks! will appeal mainly to those patient enough for turn-based wargames and more interested in mechanics than flash. If hex-based strategy games ever grabbed you — whether it was Panzer General or anything from SSI's catalog — this is a notch more humble, but functional. You can play it in your browser without wrestling with DOSBox or drivers, and the editor makes sense to anyone who wants to stage their own Kursk. It's not a big nostalgia trip, but it does what it sets out to do.