This is a little bit inside-baseball, but April 1st is well-known as the worst day in the games news calendar. All in the name of fun, developers and publishers will produce lavish screenshots and press releases advertising joke modes that don’t actually exist. Some of these turn out to be actual games though, and these can be a real treat. Arma Reforger‘s prank game, Tiny Wars, is a perfect example.
Arma Reforger is the latest entry in the normally extremely serious Arma series of military simulation games. For April Fools Day this year, developer Bohemia Interactive released a set of screenshots showing a new mode in which the soldiers were shrunk down and turned into classic little plastic army men, running around a cluttered living room and taking potshots from behind piles of stacked books and clambering up onto a coffee table.
It turns out, this is now a real mode that you can play, thanks to the Arma Reforger Workshop. To jump into a round, just open the server browser and find a server running the mod – it’ll automatically download whatever components you need, and the Tiny Wars mod itself is only around 57 megabytes.
Once you’ve found a server, you simply pick a color and a type of army figurine and join the battle. The only mode I’ve seen is the familiar control point style team vs. team battles, with two teams vying for control of a handful of flags placed on key points in the map.
The change in scale allows for a lot of goofiness: there are purple pool floaties scattered around the living room that allow you to super-jump high up into the air to get on top of various bits of furniture, high-powered weapons like machine guns and sniper rifles available it certain points, and a fun sense of low-stakes silliness surrounding the whole thing.
Bohemia Interactive says it’ll host official Tiny Wars servers until April 9, but after that, anyone will be able to host their own Tiny Wars server if they feel like spinning up a few rounds.
Arma 3 is on our list of the best war games on PC, and Reforger is kind of an interstitial piece between it and what will eventually be Arma 4. Also be sure to check our our list of the best multiplayer games on PC.
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