I have written several times about the tiny Norse boys of Bad North. This mini strategy game sees you marshalling different squads of troops to defend a procedurally generated island from viking invaders.

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Bloody Norsemen. They don’t know how good they have it, up there on those tiny frozen islands. Here I am, sticking another water bottle in the freezer and they’re still up there bashing each other into a bloody pulp over a pile of snow. Typical. It’s about time someone went up and gave them a good shake-up. Things might be grim up north, but Bad North is selling a convincing pitch to head back – and we haven’t even talked about today’s big update.

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The units should feel like humans, says Oskar St lberg, co-creator of Bad North, a strategy game about little soldiers defending their islands against bad Vikings. They re quite stylised; they don t have faces and barely have arms, but they should feel human in their behaviour and what they re capable of doing. They should feel fragile and it should look like fighting is a courageous effort.

You might be surprised about how much work Bad North does to make your tiny soldiers human. They lead surprisingly full, if short, little virtual lives, and some of the fullest are led by its doughty pikemen, whose weapon of choice presented their creators all manner of weird problems.

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Bad North is the first game for a long while that has stirred in me a terrible desire to have it in physical toy form. I would, I think, love nothing more right now than to have a tiny island on my desk, with tiny squads of soldiers and tiny corpses of my enemies on the shore, near where they had beached their tiny boats.

As you marshal your troops around each randomly generated, adorable little wind blasted island, they make teeny soldierly noises: hup hup hup! hup!> Their little boots patter across the ground. They would be terrible choking hazards to a man, but that’s fine because I would die for these small bois. The islands could have that weird sawdusty grass that Warhammer figures have on their bases. It d be great. War is hell.

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Another day, another place to buy and launch your games from, although Discord does has the advantage of already being on a huge number of PCs. The gaming-centric multi-chat service just launched its integrated game store, albeit in beta. A few temporary exclusives aside (Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption and Bad North seem noteworthy), it seems largely what you’d expect from a modern games storefront. Still, the upgraded Nitro subscription service – now including access to a library of games – might be worth a look for gaming on the cheap.

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I m not sure if Bad North is a strategy game for the inept or the lazy. It does a lot that speaks to both: the islands you re defending are small, you ve only a few units to guide and those instructions don t extend beyond go there or hide in that . When they do get there they auto-attack any marauders in reach and pursue the stragglers. It even slurps into slow motion when you select units, giving you extra thinking time, or time to watch diddy soldiers deliver vicious beatings. For someone so bad at multitasking I can t even walk and drink from a can at the same time, this is an RTS game I can finally play. See the video for proof…

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