Ambush! was published in 1983, perhaps at a peak time of the board wargaming hobby's popularity.  A number of successful purpose-designed solitaire titles had been on the market for years, (Wolfpack, a submarine game, had been published in 1974, for example, and B-17: Queen of the Skies debuted in 1981). Ambush! was a unique mix of individual character interaction and a less hardware oriented approach than other solitaire games which tended to be weighted heavily toward the simulation scale of the spectrum between game and sim.

Game play is uniquely divided between Operations and Rounds; the solo player moves freely in Operations until the presence of the enemy is detected. This is done by making "paragraph checks." A mission cartridge (several, in fact, for each scenario ("mission") in the game) is coded with data, and each time a friendly soldier moves into a new hex he reads the data off the mission cartridge. The paragraph booklet, with numbered instructional paragraphs - hundreds of them - contains the preprogrammed artificial intelligence that makes the game work, and will trigger random events, place enemy soldiers in their position, and generally guide the player through the mission. Once the enemy is spotted, play is segmented into Action Rounds, with the turn sequence determined by chit activation. Initiative and command ratings for individual soldiers help determine the order of movement also. The combat system is simple - you try and hit targets, then damage them, but unlike, for example, the Advanced Squad Leader To Hit table, there are not 300 cases to be memorized nor are there complex data modelling for the equipment.

The intent of the designers was to capture the feel of television shows like Combat! and the player's squad of heroes (abbreviated to a playable eight men per mission - historically, G.I.s were divided into squads of 12) see more action and adventure in a single session of this game than most would historically have seen in an entire campaign. But that is the point. Hidden V-2 rocket bases, downed pilots, U-boat bases, enemy tank and parachute attacks, all show up during the missions or those of the sequel modules.

Replayability may well be in the eye of the beholder; some won't enjoy replaying games where they know what to expect the second time, others will enjoy the challenge of bettering their performance, and some will be able to revisit the missions after long absences not remembering what they had encountered.

This successful game series spawned a companion series, Battle Hymn, set in the Pacific, as well as a two-player variant called Shell-Shock, and a tank variant called Open Fire.

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