If names like "The Battle of Grimdal's Tomb" or "The Battle of Red Axe Pass" resonate with you like "Crécy" would to a medieval English longbowman, then the wilfully low-fi graphics of SOVL: Fantasy Warfare are a Proustian rush waiting to happen.

Units are represented by color-coded rectangles, with line art for artillery, monsters, and the terrain they fight around, all depicted from a top-down perspective as detached as any view of a tabletop. It looks rather a lot like a battle report from an old issue of Games Workshop's in-house White Dwarf magazine some time in the early 1990s.

This powerfully straightforward art style makes manoeuvering in SOVL easy to grasp. It's a turn-based wargame where positioning matters—charging into a unit's flank or rear gives +1 to your combat results, and if a unit breaks and flees while surrounded, it's automatically destroyed. That results in some interesting decisions, like whether you want your gryphon to wing over that chasm in the middle of the battlefield to attack the artillery faster, or keep it on a flank to rear-charge one of your opponent's bigger regiments as soon as they engage one of your own.

The focus is kept on those kind of sweeping, general-in-a-tent decisions because the rules are so simple. You won't have to learn Warhammer Fantasy Battle to play SOVL, which has its own rules you can read on the official Github. Though it resembles Warhammer in that you're rolling fistfuls of virtual six-siders to resolve each combat, you go straight from rolling to hit to rolling to save, skipping the roll-to-wound in the middle. The psychology rules have been streamlined as well, though I do miss having to roll to see if my giant's so drunk he falls over each turn.