A small desk of armchair generals in a quiet hollow

Wildwillowhollow began with a shared habit: a handful of friends who kept checking a war map on their phones over breakfast and comparing notes about treaties, betrayals and armies stuck in the mud. Eventually the notes became reviews, and the reviews became this site, a magazine devoted to twentieth-century war strategy in the browser.

We are based in the UK and play in the margins of ordinary life: on the train, at lunch, in the half-hour before bed. That is how most people play these games, and it shapes how we judge them. A campaign that only works if you are online every hour is not a good campaign for most readers, however clever its systems.

Our shelf is deliberately small. Six games, each tested for weeks on free accounts, each reviewed only after we have played a full match or several weeks of raids. We would rather review six games properly than sixty games badly, and we revisit our scores when a game changes significantly.

We love this genre for its stories as much as its strategy: the coalition that held together through a month of crises, the neighbour who wrote a furious newspaper editorial, the Titan that appeared on our border at dawn. If you enjoy those stories too, you are in the right place.