Scorched Earth

A round opened with the tanks scattered along a hill nobody had seen before. On your turn you set two numbers — the angle of the barrel and the power behind the shot — and fired. The shell arced under gravity and under a wind that was rolled at the start of the round and held for all of it, so the correction you learned on your first shot was still good on your second.

A hit took health off a tank and a bite out of the hill. That second part is what made it a game rather than a maths exercise: the ground was a record of everything that had already been fired. Dig far enough under a tank and it fell, and the fall hurt. Bury yourself in a crater and the ridge you were sheltering behind was also the ridge in your way.

Between rounds you spent your winnings. The arsenal ran from a Baby Missile that did almost nothing up through cluster weapons that split in the air, incendiaries that pooled and burned down a slope, and dirt weapons that put terrain back rather than taking it away. Defensive kit mattered as much: shields to soak a hit, parachutes so a collapse under your tracks was survivable.

Because the money came from the last round, the shop kept the game honest. Winning bought you better weapons, which made you likelier to win — and the only counter was that everybody else had been shopping too.

Angle, power, wind, destructible ground and a shop between rounds is a complete grammar, and almost every turn-based artillery game since has spoken it. Worms took it into a team game with a timer and a personality four years later; the free-to-play era rebuilt it again for browsers and phones. The controls have barely moved in thirty years, which is the strongest thing you can say about a design.