Phantom Doctrine

Phantom Doctrine is a 2018 turn-based tactics game set during the Cold War, from the studio that made Hard West. You run a secret agency fighting a conspiracy that reaches into every government. From a hideout you recruit agents, send them across a world map to investigate, and analyse documents on a board where you join clues with string.

Missions often start in disguise, with agents walking freely until the alarm goes up. Combat is turn-based. Shots do not miss: instead, agents can spend awareness to turn a hit into a graze. Agents can be captured, interrogated and brainwashed, and enemies can do the same to yours.

Its campaign layer has the right shape for a spy war: a hideout, agents to recruit, a world to send them across, and an investigation to piece together. The idea that one of your own agents might be a sleeper is a good source of paranoia.

Reviewers at release found the missions repetitive and the tutorial weak, and the campaign is long.

Phantom Doctrine has Jagged Alliance 2's sense of a war run from a desk, with people to hire and send away, and adds the paranoia of espionage. Its stealth openings give each mission the same choice Jagged Alliance 2 offers: go quietly, or go loud.