Introduction
It’s that time of the year again, where every publication goes out and gives out all sorts of awards to try and objectively put a crown on a very subjective matter in things like what’s “the best game of the year”, or “the most influential game”, or even “is Clair Obscure a best RPG than Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2?”.
Well, this is silly, so why not embrace it and create the silliest awards in gaming?
Welcome to the first-ever Silly Strategy and Wargaming Games of the Year Awards 2025, where we celebrate the strategy and wargaming titles that made us stop, stare, and say: “Wait… that’s silly.” From bizarre mechanics to gloriously unhinged design choices, these awards honor the games that dared to be clever, strange, and wonderfully ridiculous.
Most Cinematic Way to Lose an Entire Battalion Award – Broken Arrow
Look over there! Did you? Well, you just lost half of your troops and lost the game! Broken Arrow is many things: highly detailed, deeply intricate, and unapologetically complex. But above all else, it’s one of the most stressful modern real-time strategy multiplayer games you can play. Lose track of a single unit for even a moment, and it’s gone. Step out of the treeline? Destroyed. Queue the wrong build? Wiped out. Move down the wrong road? A precision airstrike just erased your platoon.
Set in the modern era, Broken Arrow fully embraces the lethality of contemporary warfare, where every weapon system feels devastating and every mistake is punished instantly. Positioning isn’t just important—it’s everything. If you’re looking for a strategy game that keeps you constantly anxious about whether your units are an inch out of place, Broken Arrow delivers that pressure in spades.
The “Finally! A New Game After 20 Years” Award – Commandos: Origins
Here’s something I would have never thought would happen: A new Commandos game. After pioneering the stealth-tactics genre with 1998 classic Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, elevanting the standarts with Commandos 2: Men of Courage in 2001, and going 3D with Commandos 3: Destination Berlim, the series found itself in an identity crisis during the early 2000s, and a less-than-stellar FPS (not my opinion, because I think that Commandos: Strike Force is one of the most fun FPSs ever), that attempted to capitalize on the World War 2 shooter craze, the series went dormant for nearly a decade. In 2020, it attempted a comeback with some remasters, which were also poorly received, so everybody assumed the series was dead for good. Well, not really, because Commandos: Origins came out in 2025, and it was actually quite good! We can now say: “Finally! A new game after 20 years”!
Best Strategy Game That Made Me Open Excel Award – Europa Universalis 5
Look, do you have a corporate job where you have to manage a lot of balance sheets? Do you enjoy that? Do you wish to continue doing that after your 9 to 5 is over? Oh, you do? Then you’re in for a blast with Europa Universalis 5, because this grand strategy game from Paradox Interactive has such a complex economic system that you won’t be managing just one, or two, or three excel sheets, but dozens of them if you want to make sure you know how your internal production is doing, how the inflation is affecting your kingdom finances, how the production of wool from the other side of the planet is affecting the price of of fruit in southern Spain, and so on, and on, and on. I gave Europa Universalis 5 a solid.
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