The game begins in 1944, when three British parachute divisions land in Denmark with the task of maintaining the main bridges along the 100-kilometer corridor from Eindhoven to Amhem. After capturing these bridges, the Allies plan to advance to the flank of the German defense and quickly strike through northern Germany to reach Berlin before Christmas. This operation is called Market-Garden.
In the game you can play as both the Allies and the Germans. Each of these pages has different goals to accomplish. When you are on the side of the allied forces, you must capture and hold all the bridges. However, as a German commander, you must repel Allied attacks and, as a last resort, destroy bridges.
A Bridge Too Far is a real-time strategy game, and your soldiers react to orders depending on their current mental and physical state. Their behavior is influenced by factors such as stress, fatigue, mental performance and, of course, skills. Depending on these factors, your people will follow orders immediately or with some delay, or in the worst case scenario, they will not follow them at all. Each soldier who takes part in combat, regardless of which side, has his own identification table, thanks to which you can see what condition he is in and what he is doing at a given moment. Command is based on giving orders not to individual soldiers, but to entire units. You can't send one man to scout - only a whole squad can do it. This is a certain inconvenience, because without knowing where the enemy is hiding, it is easy to walk into an ambush and lose the entire unit, and the number of troops in each action is limited.
In the game you can play single battles, entire operations and, of course, the Market-Garden campaign.
During the game, you have at your disposal all types of weapons that were available to soldiers fighting on both sides during World War II. There are the famous German Tigers, English Shermans and much more. The fact that the amount of ammunition is limited also adds to the game's realism.