by Bill Simoni, 10 December 2025
Saratoga from the Battles of the American Revolution (BoAR) series, designed by Mark Miklos, is the latest GMT game to get a computer game adaption. Available on Steam, it was developed by Hexes of War, the studio behind a trio of Mark Herman games from RBM Studio and GMT: Gettysburg, Waterloo, and Rebel Fury. This is their first foray, at least on Steam, away from that (essentially) common ruleset. GMT and Hexes of War kindly provided a Steam key.
The game was originally slated for a November release, but was pushed back a month due to a rule implementation that needed some correction. Hexes of War then took a deeper look to assure themselves there weren’t other hidden errors. It appears to have been well spent, as I engineered some corner cases, but the game handled them flawlessly.
This is a first look, not a full review. If you’re interested in how the game plays, we have a review/AAR available of the board game version.
Pre-Game View
Opening the game, we get a classic picture of General John Burgoyne and a clear interface.
click images to enlarge
The game comes with six tutorials covering movement and combat. The game rules are provided as the same PDF files GMT created for the board game, both series and game-specific rules.
Each tutorial walks you through how to use the interface to accomplish game tasks. While some of these do impart rule basics, the tutorials are not a full teach of the game itself. Each tutorial loads a game state and coaches your actions. Each one is concise, but sufficient to learn the user interface (UI).
The game can be played online against an opponent or locally. Playing online puts you into a lobby to await someone wanting to play the same scenario as you. I suspect pre-arranging games otherwise will be the main way games are set up, rather than waiting for a random opponent.
Local play can be against an AI, solo (playing both sides), or hotseating (literally swapping seats in front of the computer with an opponent as needed).
In-Game Presentation
Once you are inside the game itself, the UI is clean and easy to use. The sequence of play is always up on the left side of the screen, the top contains messages about the action currently being played, the right side tracks the score and momentum chips, while the bottom shows the turn track and army morale values. The score, momentum, and army morale each have a “?” that, when clicked, shows you the calculation and any relevant history on how the values were updated.
During the movement phase, once you click on a unit, you are shown all adjacent hexes that are a legal move (green) and all hexes the unit can reach with its movement allowance (yellow).
It took some practice for me to remember to manually tell the game my movement for a unit was complete if I was not moving it the full movement allowance. However, until you indicate you are done with all your moves, you can easily undo everything.
Defensive artillery and rifle fire share similar interfaces to both select firing/target units and resolve them. I expected rifle fire to be tricky since it is simultaneous, but this implementation was smoothly done.
Close combat can get complicated since the rules require all possible attacking units to attack all possible defending units. The game helps by automatically setting up the attacks where no options exist. Whenever it could be ambiguous the game requires the user to outline attacks. You can easily cancel any combat, even the auto setup ones, and manually redo them. This is useful if you wish to use the “diversion” rule.
The game then allows you to pick the order the combats occur; walks you through choosing lead units and tactics; and displays the drms, dice roll, and results.
Final Thoughts
Hexes of War did a great job with this faithful implementation. The UI is relatively intuitive, and what issues I did have were cleared up with the tutorials. Everything you need to understand the game state, player aids, and rules are easily available. My only UI issue revolved around my familiarity with Vassal and wanting/expecting to see stacked units by hovering. However, it only took a few minutes to reorient myself to click on the gray boxes that accompany stacked units.
Next up: Solo play against the AI
You can chat about this game in the Age of Gunpowder section of our discussion forums
Battles of the American Revolution Series
Mentioned in Dispatches Episode ~ Series Intro ~ Saratoga ~ Brandywine ~ Guilford Courthouse ~ Eutaw Springs ~ Savannah ~ Monmouth ~ Pensacola ~ Germantown
Camden Event Podcast Episode
Saratoga Digital ~ First Impressions ~ Gaming vs The AI
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