PC version of Ogre, the board game about cybernetic tank warfare, is out now

The PC adaptation of Steve Jackson's tabletop wargame, Ogre, rolled onto Steam this week. It's a turn-based combat game with both single player and multiplayer modes. The key units are ogres, super-powered war machines that blast through pretty much anything in their path.

In the board game, which first launched in 1977, one player controls a single ogre while the other tries to blow it apart piece by piece with infantry, tanks and missile launchers. That's an option here, but in some cases Ogres will be supported by other units, ramping up the scale of the conflict.

It all takes place on a hex-based battlefield, and you'll play ranked multiplayer games online controlling either the North American Combine or the Paneuropean Federation. You can learn the ropes in single-player missions and a tutorial mode.

I've never played the board game but it's clearly very popular: the Steam version only came about because it was a stretch goal for a new, Kickstarted version of the tabletop game. Jackson asked for $20,000 for the project—he got more than $900,000.

Ogre is $24.99/£18.99 on Steam. Check out the trailer at the top of this article plus some screens below to see if it ticks the right boxes. For what it's worth, early user reviews are mostly positive.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.