While I'm at board games, here's two more you haven't heard of:
Samurai Blades: On Deadly Ground
Cry Havoc: Test of Faith
(both can be windowed - toggled with F4 - if the stretching bothers you)
Two adaptations of
Cry Havoc board game and its expansion
Samurai Blades. You can play against AI or a human opponent, and
CH also lets you play online (but I have no idea if this mode works nowadays).
Both share several battle maps (with
SB also having big maps being combinations of three normal ones, and a Castle map with more complex walls/obstacles), but available units are different -
SB has Japanese-themed units (samurais, ninjas, monks) and more of them than in case of
CH's European medieval army. Overall, there's just enough variety in them not to get boring too fast.
You create scenarios by placing units on one of available maps (no limits as to where they can be placed but you can set point cost limits for both sides). Units come in several categories and each one has several level tiers that affect their stats and point cost. There's no HP, hit units instead either lose some movement points on dodging, get wounded (lowered stats), stunned (temporarily can't act) or just die. Ranged units can't shoot through forest hexes and walls, and mounted units can't cross some hex types. Most units can move quite far so flanking is possible (although AI seems to only use it accidentally and prefers closest targets).
SB has each player's turn split into shooting-movement-shooting-melee phases, in that order (which makes archers quite powerful).
CH modifies boardgame's rules and there's one shooting phase, movement phase (crossbowmen can't shoot and move in the same turn), melee phase, and a cool addition of defensive shot phase where each ranged unit targets a hex and if opponent's unit moves into it during his turn, it will provoke a free shot from the ranged unit (the AI uses it too).
Quality-wise,
CH's units and UI look better;
SB is more zoomed out and unit sprites are smaller, which makes it harder to tell them apart from each other and from some backgrounds. I prefer persistent dead bodies of
SB though (it's nice to see all the casualties after the battle ends), which the author removed in
CH "to improve visibility".
CH also has useful hotkey additions and the AI seems a bit smarter in it. There are some basic sounds (step sounds for each hex move can get annoying) and music-wise it's some medieval prayer for
CH and FF6's overworld theme for
SB (lol).
As a side note,
CH's maps consist of .BMP and .MAP files (
SB's are hardcoded), and the latter is a plain text file so if someone would bother deciphering what the numbers in it mean, new maps could be created for it.
To make them compatible with modern OSes you have to use the conversion utility linked at the end of this article:
https://help.yoyogames.com/hc/en-us/articles/216753218-Troubleshooting-Legacy-GameMaker
