Frozen Synapse

Frozen Synapse is a 2011 tactics game from the British studio Mode 7. Each match puts two small squads in a randomly generated building drawn in sharp neon lines. Both sides plan the next few seconds at once, without seeing what the other side intends, then commit. The turn plays out simultaneously, and both players watch.

While planning you can test your moves against guesses about the enemy: put a ghost of an enemy unit where you think it will be and see who wins the exchange. Units are soldiers with different weapons, a shotgun, a machine gun, a rocket launcher, a sniper rifle, and a shot that hits first wins.

It is the clearest modern version of the simultaneous turn, and one of the purest tactics games ever made. A good turn is a correct guess about what the other side will do, and watching it play out is tense in a way few games manage. Its multiplayer, played asynchronously, made it a cult hit.

It has no characters to care about and only a thin single-player story. It is a game about thinking, not about people.

Frozen Synapse keeps nothing of Jagged Alliance 2's campaign or cast. It is here because it solved the problem Jagged Alliance 2's interrupts were trying to solve: how to let a turn-based game react to the enemy rather than watch it. Both sides move at once, so neither side simply waits.