Square Wars is my first hidden gem of 2025. It's a minimalist strategy game with subtle tactics you learn after a few playthroughs that begin to show its actual depth. You start to realize you can use cards in combination to say, damage an enemy with a volcano, then buy the expensive land expansion card to plop down in the middle of their territory after the ash clears, and suddenly you have an effective flanking tactic. At the current price point of $2.99 ($2.39 on sale) I'm thoroughly satisfied, having already exceeded my $1 = 1 hour of gameplay metric.

Since this is an EA Game, some notes to the Developer from a UX perspective:
- The gameplay loop clearly has implicit stages, where you're first grinding for material harvests, then grinding for stat boosts, then grinding for territory expansion. I'd love to see more cards that help facilitate this and make it more engaging. After four full playthroughs this became a game of how quickly I could refresh the cards and read the stat adjustments. This is fine and all, but will ultimately be the reason I stop playing as ~30 minutes of constant simple math is not very relaxing or engaging.
-I love the basic Attack / Defense system, but it still isn't super clear to me based on the description in-game. The Attack and Defense values in your example equate to 100, which was never the case in my playthroughs, and I often had enemies with significantly lower Attack and Defense hold their own against me for longer than made sense based on the disparity.
-I'd love a map editor with Community-made maps. Ideally, with more tile options for different landscapes, but even without that, I'd love to have a selection of maps to choose from. The random nature of the map is just fine for what it is, but I feel I'd enjoy the game more if I had a selection of strategically-crafted maps to choose from as well, with purposeful choke points, resource allocation, and the like.
-I appreciate the sound cue for an attack happening, but it would be nice if there were a distinct sound if YOU are the one being attacked. Many times two enemies would be attacking each other, but I had to confirm each time I wasn't the one under attack. Directional sound for the attacks would be nice, too, so I know to move the camera in the direction of the sound.
-If I think of more to say after more playthroughs I'll return, but great work and keep it up! I'm excited to see where you take this title and I'll be on the lookout for your future releases, too!

Fun at beginning, but such a pain to finish the game, even if you have great advantage over your enemies. You have max attack, max deffence, ton of resourses, but all you do is rerolling to get cards that give action points to attack enemy squares. It just amazingly disappointing at late game.

This game has some unique ideas as it is early Access there is still things to figure out but the main game play is there