The power of the GameBoy Advance is allowing developers to mine territory that has until now been mostly unexplored in the handheld field. Turn-based military strategy games have long held their court on the PC, with consoles getting a leftover scrap here and there (Military Madness for the TG-16 and King’s Ransom for the Genesis spring to mind). In fact, handhelds haven’t been completely left out of the loop – Advance Wars is the sequel to the Japan-only GameBoy cart titled GameBoy Wars.

In Advance Wars, you act as the advisor to several different Commanding Officers (COs) of the Orange Star army in their struggle against various enemy factions. Missions begin with a short description of the goal (capture a majority of buildings, destroy all enemy units, capture the enemy base, etc.), and end when you have fulfilled that goal or been defeated.

You have at your disposal an arsenal of twelve different units, ranging across land, sea and air, and in many missions, you control bases that give you the ability to create new units throughout the battle. Each unit on the field is important to your cause in some way. Infantry are weak but are the only units that can capture buildings and bases for you. Tanks come in two sizes and can decimate infantry and light vehicles, but are cannon fodder to artillery and mobile rocket launchers, which can fire from long distances. These ranged units, however, cannot attack once an enemy unit gets within one or two spaces of them and have weak armor. Helicopters can attack air and ground units, Bombers can eradicate just about any ground unit, fighter planes can tear up choppers and bombers, and all three air units are sitting ducks if confronted by an anti-air truck, which can also turn its powerful machine guns against infantry to great effect. If this all sounds a little like chess, that’s not far from the mark. You’ll need to carefully study the battlefield, be intimately familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of every type of unit, and choose your moves wisely.

Luckily, Advance Wars does not toss you into this complicated battle unprepared. Before you’re able to begin the main campaign, you must complete a 15 level training campaign. Each stage of this campaign will familiarize you with the process of playing the game – from capturing cities and bases, moving and attacking, and checking the attack range on enemy units, it’s all here. The tutorial is so good, and in places, tough, that after completing it, you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something along with learning how to play the game.

Once in the campaign, you’ll earn the help of different COs, each of whom has his or her own strengths and weaknesses, as well as a "CO Power," kind of like a super move that can be activated after a meter fills up. Andy, your initial CO is well-balanced – he has no specific strengths or weaknesses, and his CO Power, Super Repair, repairs 2 HP to all of your damaged units across the field. Later in the game you’ll earn the ability to play as more complex COs, like Max, whose ground units all do more damage than normal but whose range attack units are weak and can’t fire as far as normal. Max’s CO Power beefs up his already strong units for a single round, causing them to inflict greater damage.

Advance Wars plays out on colorful, well-designed maps, and selecting and moving your units is a breeze.

The interface is even easy when it comes to somewhat advanced techniques like checking the defense rating on various terrain, scooping out the possible movement range and attack range of enemy units, and checking your vehicles supply of gas and ammo. In a move that reminds me of another of my favorite console war games, Sega’s Herzog Zwei, you’ll need to build APCs, which double here as supply trucks, and move them around the map to re-load your units with ammo (machine gun ammo is infinite, but any unit that fires shells, rockets or missiles have finite supplies) and gasoline. Units that run out of either commodity in the thick of battle are sitting ducks unless you can run supplies out to them quickly. Alternatively, captured cities and bases will also re-supply your forces as well as repair them.

I’ve only played one multiplayer match of Advance Wars so far, but judging from the experience, I can confidently state that the game has incredible potential in this area. There are dozens of maps to choose from, and new ones can be purchased with the coins you earn in the campaign mode. Options abound – you can set the match goals, from base capture, unit destruction, city capture, you can toggle fog of war, set teams or free for all, and toggle other factors like random weather and CO powers. Even better, because the game is turn-based, you won’t even need multiple GBAs to get a multiplayer game going, let alone multiple game paks. One GBA will suffice, with the players passing it around and taking their turns in private. This is great, especially if you want to play with the sneakier fog of war option turned on. In this mode, units sitting in forests are invisible unless an enemy unit moves directly next to it. Also, you can only see what your units can, making for stealth tactics of units moving from forest to forest and sneaking into enemy bases for the kill.

Advance Wars is a great game. It’s certainly not the most complex or realistic turn-based strategy sim out there, but for accessibility and sheer fun, it’s hard to beat.