Acceptable Losses: you do not go over the top, you sign the paper ordering it

The first line of the store page is the best review anybody could write of this game: you are not the hero, you are in charge.

Everything is there. Acceptable Losses does not put you in the trench, it puts you behind it, at the desk, with the forms.

The rhythm of a day

By day you hand out missions. Patrols, trench repairs, wiring parties, assaults. You decide who goes and who stays.

At night you do paperwork. You read incident reports, review medical updates, scan intelligence briefings, and hope reinforcements arrive on time.

You have twenty days to survive. That is all they ask.

That division is brilliant because it places the game exactly where war fiction never goes: in administration. What eats at you is not the noise, it is the line in a report telling you what a decision taken that morning cost.

What makes the numbers uncomfortable

Soldiers are generated with a name and a birthplace. Death is permanent within your squads.

Those are two tiny mechanics, technically trivial, and they are enough to turn a management spreadsheet into a matter of conscience. You do not lose three men on a night sortie, you lose three names, and you read them again that evening in a report.

The game's title then acquires its full meaning: acceptable losses are an accounting category, and the game forces you to use it.

The density, for five and a half euros

The announced content is surprisingly substantial.

Over sixty missions, from routine trench duty to full assaults, each with at least six possible outcomes. Over a hundred and twenty events that occur mid-mission and shift the result in real time. Over thirty night events affecting squads, supplies and trench conditions. Over fifteen modifiers, including morale, fatigue, weather and enemy readiness.

You can also join a mission personally, which lifts your men's morale and exposes you to injury. It is the only way to pay with your own body, and it is risky.

Above you, headquarters evaluates you. Serve well and you gain influence and better conditions. Serve badly and they take them back. And if your results are judged acceptable, you will be ordered over the top, then told to hold the captured trenches until replacements arrive.

What it is worth

The game launched today, developed and published by Zann Archive, and currently has six reviews, all positive. That is far too few to draw a conclusion from, and I mention it mainly so nobody mistakes the figure for an endorsement.

What is solid, though, is the ratio of ambition to price: 5.59 euros, four hundred megabytes of disk, a mouse, and any machine from the last decade.

This is a game of text and tables, austere, with no graphical concessions. If you need spectacle, walk on by. If the idea of commanding without ever firing a shot intrigues you, there are not many places to try it.

What I take away

There are war games that claim to be about war and are really about shooting. This one is about responsibility, and it does it with the only tool that makes the thing unbearable: a list of names, a column of outcomes, and your signature at the bottom.

Twenty days is short. It is also exactly long enough to understand why that phrase exists.

How many men did you have left on day twenty? Tallies are compared on the InsertCoins Discord.