Advance Wars Revolution (awRev) is an active Advance Wars community site with strategy guides, walkthroughs, Design Maps, creator resources, and community tools. Its users include players, map designers, guide writers, video creators, tournament organizers, and other contributors.
awRev includes strategy guides, campaign walkthroughs, Re-Boot Camp resources, videos, community projects, creator profiles, Discord access, tournament history, community history, submissions, and a large Design Maps database combining restored historical entries with approved current submissions.
Founded in August 2005 and rebuilt in 2026 by YoyoYoshi, Advance Wars Revolution now combines current guides, maps, contributor work, submissions, and community tools with surviving material from earlier Advance Wars communities.
Advance Wars Revolution (awRev) is an active Advance Wars community website founded by YoyoYoshi. It hosts strategy resources, creator projects, Design Maps, contributor pages, submissions, and links to community discussion through Discord and other awRev tools.
Modern awRev supports current participation through walkthroughs, strategy guides, videos, Design Maps, community submissions, contributor pages, and continuing Advance Wars projects. Historical material remains available alongside current resources rather than being presented as a separate site.
The original awRev operated from August 2005 through May 2007. Its staff and members developed walkthroughs, guides, Design Maps, tournaments, forums, community systems, and contributor-created projects during the Advance Wars: Dual Strike era.
The 2026 relaunch placed surviving historical material, restored maps, and contributor records into the same site as current guides, submissions, Discord links, and new community projects.
Origins (2003–2005)
YoyoYoshi did not build awRev in isolation. During the early 2000s, the English-language Advance Wars community centered around several major fansites, including Advance Wars Net (AWN), Advance Wars Bunker (AWB), Advance Wars Revival, BHHQ, Wars World News, and later Wars Central. These communities hosted walkthroughs, Design Maps, strategy discussion, forums, downloads, fan projects, tournaments, and community events during the growth of the Advance Wars series.
AWN hosted walkthroughs, Design Maps, strategy guides, forums, fan projects, downloads, and community discussion during the Advance Wars, Advance Wars 2, and early Advance Wars: Dual Strike period.
During 2003–2005, YoyoYoshi contributed through walkthrough writing, community participation, and Design Maps moderation. As an AWN Design Maps moderator, he helped review and approve submissions.
Beyond moderation, YoyoYoshi created several real-world historical maps, including the World War II European Campaign, and participated in Design Maps discussion. The surviving source text supports his use of concepts such as terrain variety, but this page does not attempt to measure their broader influence on other map creators.
YoyoYoshi also originated the Black Hole Campaign concept, which was later completed by Sarumarine. This sits alongside his map-design, moderation, and guide-writing work from the same period.
At the same time, YoyoYoshi wrote several Advance Wars strategy guides and walkthroughs that GameFAQs and AWN published. His Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2 walkthroughs became widely used community resources, helping players navigate the games while contributing to the broader ecosystem of guides, maps, campaigns, and strategy discussion that defined the era.
Contributors often moved among guides, Design Maps, custom campaigns, strategy discussion, tournaments, and forum participation. awRev later brought many of those activity types together on one site.
Founding of awRev (2005)
YoyoYoshi, FoGo, and others founded Advance Wars Revolution in August 2005 during the height of the Advance Wars: Dual Strike era. They wanted to build a new community drawing on many of the strengths that had helped earlier Advance Wars communities grow.
Rather than focusing on a single area of the fandom, the early team designed awRev to bring together walkthroughs, strategy guides, Design Maps, tournaments, forums, community projects, and contributor-created content in one place. The goal was for players, creators, guide writers, map designers, and competitive players to participate together.
The forums officially launched on August 20, 2005, initially using phpBB before later transitioning to IPB. The main site followed shortly afterward, with a new layout appearing on August 24. From the beginning, awRev emphasized both original content and community participation, combining guides, custom systems, events, and contributor-driven projects into a rapidly growing Advance Wars fansite.
Early Growth (2005–2006)
Early guides from Firefox, FoGo, MJF, YoyoYoshi, and other contributors appeared alongside forums, community projects, tournaments, and original site content.
Within weeks of launch, awRev was active alongside other large Advance Wars communities. If comparative size claims are retained elsewhere, they should be read as historical community characterizations rather than as measured traffic rankings.
Contributors drove that growth through walkthroughs, strategy guides, Design Maps, forums, tournaments, community systems, and active participation. Players who arrived for guides often became community members, while forum users frequently contributed maps, content, and projects of their own.
At one point, YoyoYoshi and others seriously considered merger discussions with Advance Wars Bunker (AWB). For a site that had launched only months earlier, the possibility of combining two of the community's largest sites reflected just how quickly awRev had grown.
Core Team
As awRev grew, staff members took on webmaster, administration, moderation, technical, content, tournament, and community-management roles.
YoyoYoshi served as owner and webmaster, overseeing site direction, walkthrough formatting, tournaments, content organization, staffing, updates, goals, and long-term development. Drawing on earlier experience from AWN, he helped shape awRev's focus on integrating guides, community systems, contributor participation, and custom content into a single ecosystem.
Term1nal co-owned the domain and handled major technical work, including forum upgrades, layouts, hosting, and army system changes. His technical contributions helped support the site's rapid growth during its most active period.
Syzygy became co-webmaster and administrator in April 2006 before later serving as head manager. He contributed heavily to forum organization, skins, snippets, Game of the Month, Command Log systems, content updates, and major guide work including the AWDS CO Guide. Syzygy also originally created the awRev Design Maps section.
DeeWaiWai (DYY) helped keep the community active during key stretches, serving as forum administrator and head manager while contributing to community direction and activity initiatives. Alex (RhinoFeeder/Ryxa) later became Hiring Manager, provisional administrator, and head manager, leading activity pushes, forum changes, member forums, sports boards, World Cup organization, wiki rules, and community events.
Firefox, The_Roses_Thorn, MoogleGunner, and many other staff members contributed moderation, technical support, content development, community systems, and day-to-day operations that helped sustain awRev throughout its original run.
Contributors and Content
Community members contributed guides, reference material, reviews, maps, strategy content, and other resources. The surviving contributor lists show a broad range of individual authors and project types.
Many contributors expanded the site's content library. Sarumarine provided campaign map images and Black Cannon Blues. Supernova contributed movement charts. Graymalkin wrote a complete medals guide. Yukkie-San contributed AWDS unit information and secrets. Lightning Strike contributed an AWDS review and Design Map Advice. xanga985 contributed the Pincer Strike guide and medals information. Dragor contributed Survival Mission 6 material. GAFFAguy contributed AWDS medals information. Darth Vader wrote an in-depth Grimm guide. oomouwmouw contributed the AWDS Combat Guide.
Community members also submitted guides, strategy articles, maps, forum content, competitive discussion, and creative projects, so the site included both staff-produced and contributor-produced material.
Beyond written content, staff and contributors developed community systems including Advanced Members, Snippets, Game of the Month, Command Logs, Revolution Wars, army forums, tournaments, the awRev World Cup, the wiki, affiliates, custom skins, chatrooms, and member-driven submissions. These features encouraged members not only to consume content, but to create it.
Design Maps
Design Maps were a major content area at both AWN and awRev. Creators designed, tested, discussed, revised, and shared custom Advance Wars maps through those communities.
Kamek created the original AWN Design Maps section, and The Sleeping Leg and Roma_emu later maintained it. During the community's growth years, YoyoYoshi served as an AWN Design Maps moderator, helping review and approve submissions while working alongside many of the creators who helped expand the collection.
When the early team launched awRev, Design Maps quickly became one of its major content areas as well. Syzygy later created the original awRev Design Maps section, providing a home for custom maps, creator experimentation, competitive designs, campaign-style scenarios, and community discussion.
The surviving Design Maps material includes competitive maps, gimmick maps, campaign-style scenarios, experimental mechanics, puzzles, challenges, and other custom concepts. The page does not attempt to estimate total community design or testing hours.
As communities closed and websites disappeared, some attribution records, images, downloads, and map pages became inaccessible. Surviving material came from backups, personal collections, and partial web captures.
YoyoYoshi built the modern Design Maps Database to reunite original awRev maps and recovered AWN maps in a single searchable platform featuring creator attribution, metadata reconstruction, image matching, contributor profiles, comments, recommendations, uploads, and room for future community contributions.
Today, the Design Maps database combines restored historical entries and approved current submissions in a searchable system with creator pages, comments, recommendations, and new-map submission tools. The database count is generated on the Design Maps page.
Peak and Shutdown (2006–2007)
By 2006, awRev combined walkthroughs, strategy guides, Design Maps, tournaments, forums, custom systems, staff projects, and contributor-created content.
The site also included Advanced Members, Snippets, Game of the Month, Command Logs, Revolution Wars, army forums, tournaments, custom skins, affiliates, chatrooms, and member-driven projects.
A site hack abruptly ended awRev's original run in May 2007. The hack rendered the original site, forums, systems, and much of its accumulated content inaccessible, even though many contributors and community members remained active elsewhere.
While the shutdown ended awRev's original run, its guides, maps, contributors, and community relationships remained part of the broader Advance Wars ecosystem that continued evolving in the years that followed.
After awRev (2007–2025)
During the 2000s, Advance Wars activity was distributed across multiple independent sites, including AWN, AWB, awRev, BHHQ, WWN, and Wars Central. These communities hosted guides, Design Maps, campaigns, tournaments, strategy discussion, fan projects, and their own staff and forum structures.
As site owners shut down websites, hosting expired, forums closed, and communities changed over time, creators and players lost access to large portions of that shared history. Individual sites disappeared, web archives became harder to navigate, forum attachments broke, and creator records became difficult to reconstruct.
Design Maps were particularly affected. Surviving maps, campaigns, discussions, and creator records were scattered across backups, personal collections, forum attachments, and web archives.
During much of the 2010s, YoyoYoshi largely stepped away from both Advance Wars community involvement and creator work. While Advance Wars communities continued evolving across multiple sites, his direct participation remained limited compared to the AWN and awRev years.
Beginning in the early 2020s, he became active again through competitive gaming, GameFAQs guide writing, YouTube, and related creator work. That activity later expanded into website development and community projects.
Following the release of Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp in 2023, YoyoYoshi returned to Advance Wars content creation through playthroughs, walkthroughs, videos, and community resources. He also began gathering older community material, contributor records, and Design Maps for later reuse.
As YoyoYoshi became more active again, he gathered Design Maps materials, contributor records, guides, and other community content from across earlier Advance Wars sites while developing new systems around them. Those efforts became part of awRev's 2026 return.
Modern Rebuild (2026–Present)
In 2026, YoyoYoshi rebuilt and relaunched awRev. The modern site combines current guides, walkthroughs, videos, Design Maps, creator resources, community submissions, Discord integration, and surviving historical material.
One major 2026 project was the modern Design Maps Database. It combines original awRev material, recovered AWN maps, and approved current submissions within a searchable system with creator attribution, reconstructed metadata, contributor profiles, image matching, comments, recommendations, and uploads. The live database page calculates the current entry count.
The rebuild also restored earlier guides and community content where available, reconstructed contributor information where possible, and added new site infrastructure for current submissions and participation.
Modern awRev places older guides, Design Maps, contributor history, and community records alongside current walkthroughs, videos, database systems, submissions, Discord integration, and ongoing Advance Wars projects.
Nearly two decades after the original site's shutdown, awRev again hosts current Advance Wars guides, Design Maps, videos, community projects, contributor pages, and participation tools.
Purpose Today
Modern awRev provides Advance Wars guides, maps, creator resources, submission tools, and community links. Historical material remains available because it can still provide context, attribution, or usable resources.
awRev brings together current walkthroughs, strategy guides, videos, Design Maps, community submissions, Discord participation, contributor pages, creator projects, and surviving resources from earlier Advance Wars communities.
Advance Wars Revolution currently functions as a community site for custom content, strategy resources, creator projects, historical material, and new submissions.