OPERATION NIMROD

Content warning: violence, blood and death, including the killing of hostages, in a game based on a real terrorist siege in which people died.

16 Princes Gate, London. Monday 5 May 1980.

For six days gunmen have held the people inside the Iranian Embassy. This afternoon they killed a hostage. At 19:07 the police hand control to the army.

Operation Nimrod is a turn-based squad tactics game in the spirit of Laser Squad. You plan the assault, choose how your two teams go in, and clear the building floor by floor before the gunmen turn on the hostages.

• The real building. Six full-size floors, basement to attics, laid out from the architectural plans of No. 16.
• The real plan. Abseil to the rear balcony, blow the armoured front windows, drop a stun grenade down the skylight or go in through the garden. Two teams, four ways in.
• Nineteen hostages. Fifteen men in the telex room, four women in the cipher room. Get to them before the clock runs out, dress the wounded, and lead them down the stairs and out to the lawn, or over the balcony to next door.
• Rehearse first. Six days of the siege, six rehearsals in the killing house, with the news from Princes Gate unfolding day by day. Each rehearsal sharpens your men; each day you skip costs them.
• Doors, gas and flashbangs. Crack a door just enough to throw a stun grenade, fill a room with CS gas, and watch the hinged doors: an open door hides whoever is behind it.
• Five difficulty settings, from Easy to Crazy.

How to play: mouse or touch. Tap a trooper, then a square to move or an enemy to fire. Hover over a square to see the move cost and the odds to hit from there. HOW TO PLAY on the title screen has the rest.

A game based on a real event. The building, the date and the plan are real; every name in the game is invented. In memory of Abbas Lavasani and Ali Akbar Samadzadeh, the two hostages who were killed, and of everyone held in the embassy from 30 April to 5 May 1980.

Made by Allan Rowntree (arowx.com).