Trench

Western Front, 1916. Every yard has a cost.

Trench is a side-view tactical strategy game about one question: push farther, or dig in?

You get one day of attacking. Take the enemy's forward trench, and then decide whether to hold it or keep going for the line behind it while the enemy is still reeling. What you win by dusk is what you have to defend through the night. When dawn comes, the battle is judged on what you took, what you held and how many men it cost.

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The battle

• Day (5 minutes): lead four rifle squads and a machine-gun team across no man's land. Move them from shell hole to shell hole. Every path you draw shows how exposed it is: grey means safe, amber means one rifle can see you, red means a machine gun can.
• Artillery: you have 20 shells for the whole battle. Spend them on HE to break a position, on smoke to screen a rush, or on registering targets so you can call SOS fire after dark. Anything you use in daylight is gone when the night comes.
• Night (3 minutes): the enemy probes your line, then hits it with a barrage and an assault. Put men on stand-to, on work or on rest. Repair the trench, bring supplies up and send up flares, and hope you left enough behind.
• Dawn: you get a result tier, the men you lost, the shells you didn't use and a timeline of every trench that changed hands.

What makes it tick

• Morale is as real as ammunition. Squads get pinned, shaken and disorganized, and a retreat early is always cheaper than being broken.
• Shells destroy trenches bay by bay, and a captured trench faces the wrong way until you work on it.
• Every held line needs a supply link, and a line fed from the one behind it drains that one too.
• The simulation is deterministic: each battle comes from a seed, so you can replay the exact same fight.

Controls

• 1–5 select squads A–D and the gun · left-click to select · right-click a cover slot to move
• Q / W / E Hold / Advance / Rush · R fall back · F hold fire
• A battery (press again for Smoke, again for Register) · S SOS at night · V flare
• Z / X / C Stand-to / Work / Rest in a held trench
• Space pause · Tab 3× speed · H help

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About this build

This is a prototype. It's the smallest version of the game that can test whether "push or dig in" is a real decision: one map (the Brickworks), two capturable enemy lines, one day and one night. The art and the balance are still changing.

After each battle the debrief screen asks you two short questions and lets you copy or download a play log. Please send it to me. Your logs decide what the full game becomes.

Desktop browser, mouse and keyboard required. Runs best at 1280×720 or larger.