I haven’t seen many people talking about it, possibly because it’s still in early access, but Grand Tactician: The Civil War is just about the most grognardiest game I’ve ever played, and it’s amazing.

You start off during James Buchanan’s lame duck period, the South is seceding but several forts have refused to surrender their arms. You can raise some militia forces and set a few policies but you can’t do much until Lincoln is inaugurated, and that starts the standoff where the Civil War either starts with you triggering the Militia Act or the South firing on Fort Sumter.

If you’ve ever wanted to play a strategy game where you can track the career of every single one of your army’s officers, where securing proper equipment is done on a per-unit basis (and most of those units have contract lengths that start at a very short three months), where you have imperfect information about enemy movements and unit strengths, where when you issue orders there is a realistic delay representing the time it takes for your orders to travel to the front lines, then this is the game that finally answered my prayers.

The only downside is that actually finishing the campaign takes about as long as the actual Civil War. You’ll need to have a lot of patience for systematically liberating towns, fighting skirmishes, blockading ports/rivers, moving up and keeping your supply lines intact as you go, one mile at a time all the way from Richmond to Atlanta. It’s a very specific kind of satisfying, but it is very satisfying.

I haven’t tried playing as the south yet, because fuck that.