Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games

Deadly Games is a 1996 follow-up to Jagged Alliance, developed and published by Sir-Tech. It keeps the first game's turn-based combat and its cast of mercenaries, but drops the large map of an island. Instead it offers a series of separate missions on smaller maps, each with its own goal, with an optional time limit on each turn.

Its main addition was multiplayer. Several players can compete in one game, and commanders who want the same mercenaries or weapons have to outbid each other for them.

Bidding for mercenaries is a lovely idea, and it carried the series' personality into competitive play. The missions are focused, and some are very hard.

Without the island campaign it lacks the sense of a war being won, which is what most people love about the series. It is the least essential of the early games, best played by those who have finished the others.

Deadly Games keeps Jagged Alliance's mercenaries and combat and leaves out its strategic heart. Jagged Alliance 2 restored the campaign three years later and made it the centre of the game again. Seen from there, Deadly Games is proof that the cast alone was not enough.