The best strategy games can take up a lot of your free time, but they also give you a lot of great memories. I’ve found that these games have something for everyone, whether you like carefully planning each tactical move, leading epic battles with huge armies to watch the chaos, or just adding a personal touch by naming a group of in-game characters after your friends and throwing them into the middle of the action. These things have given me many hours of fun and moments I will never forget.
There are a lot of different kinds of games in this genre. There are fast-paced real-time games that will make you sweat to keep the timing of your build order just right, and there are also turn-based games that require you to think carefully about every move. In strategy games, you call the shots and get to feel smart about it, no matter how or why you fight.
When players have the ability to choose the actions they want to take, victory results from those better choices, and experienced players have a much better experience. Good games allow players multiple choices per round, the comparative value of which may or may not be known. These games can allow for multiple different paths to victory, allowing players to formulate different strategies at the start of the game or change as the game’s state changes. Good games make all players feel competitive throughout the game, so player-elimination games are not ideal. Below, we have mentioned the best strategy games.
Best Strategy Games
Supreme Commander 2
Supreme Commander 2 from Gas Powered Games probably doesn’t deserve the word “Supreme” in its title, but changing the title would defeat the purpose of a sequel. Not that this game isn’t a good follow-up to the 2007 original, but it’s definitely aimed at a broader (and less patient) audience. With much of the micromanagement reduced or removed altogether, Supreme Commander 2 is more of a run-of-the-mill real-time strategy title than a proud member of a distinctive series. Still, it’s a lot of fun if you can accept the changes to the gameplay.
It’s still exciting to use the mouse wheel to fly from a single engineer to a map of the entire battlefield, and then descend again to issue orders to another unit miles away. As armies mass – in sprawling columns of hundreds of robots – you are rewarded with the most glorious firefights a CPU can deliver. It’s one of the few real-time strategy games that combines air, ground and naval combat in a single battle, but SupCom goes even further, with artillery, long-range nuclear guns and megalithic experimental bots.
StarCraft 2
There are games that simply prove to be pillars of the genre, often copied but never quite matched. StarCraft was one such game for the RTS genre, and so it’s only logical that its successor simply offers more of the same in a shinier package. Even a decade after its initial release, StarCraft 2’s presentation still amazes. The campaign makes good use of the races beloved by StarCraft fans. The bombastic battles are undoubtedly the heart of the experience, total assaults that are satisfying to watch after investing time in building your armies.
StarCraft II is a strong multiplayer game. Your enemies are human; they can probably click faster than you and issue orders faster than you. You’ll lose a lot, but you’ll get better the more you play, and that makes this game a very good RTS for those who have a competitive streak. The PvE campaign is also noteworthy, since a story is difficult to convey in RTS games. Many developers resort to cutscenes or dialogs during missions, but in StarCraft II you interact with the world outside of combat.
Crusader Kings III
Crusader Kings 3 has given the series’ formerly opaque interface a major overhaul, making it a welcome offering for new players while retaining much of the depth for which the series is known. It may look like a traditional strategy game, and while it certainly has deep warfare systems, the heart of Crusader Kings 3 lies in its personal, often hilarious stories.
Crusader Kings has always been about characters rather than nations, but never before have they seemed so rich and so insanely real. Each of them is full of drive and ambition, and not infrequently turns into a petulant child when they don’t get their way. Adopting them is a huge responsibility. They can be greedy, cruel, pious, horny, constantly drunk – if you look for an adjective, you’ll find it.
Northgard
Northgard is one of the newer strategy games on this list. Released in 2021 for mobile devices, it is a port of the 2018 Steam game and is almost identical to the PC version of the game, except that it has touch controls. The game combines survival and strategy elements with kingdom building elements. You establish a settlement on a newly discovered continent. From there you manage your resources, train an army and defend yourself against bad guys and harsh winters. In the game there are several clans, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
The Viking RTS Northgard pays homage to Settlers and Age of Empires, but challenged us with its clever expansion system that forces you to carefully plan your growth into new territories. The weather is also important. You’ll have to carefully prepare for winter, but if you have better warm weather equipment than your enemies through lore, you’ll be able to get a strategic advantage.
Card Thief
Card Thief is one of the more unique strategy games. It is a mixture of strategy and card game. Your objective is to move in such a way that you won’t be detected. You have equipment, stealth points and more to help you avoid the guards and finish the level. The game time is two to three minutes per game. This makes it ideal for casual players.
Card Thief is one of the rare mobile board games that isn’t just a translation of something usually sold in a cardboard box. Card Thief uses cards in a novel way that takes full advantage of their digital home with complex strategy and unique elements that would be difficult on the tabletop. It’s fast, addictive fun – as all mobile games should be – with great strategic depth that is difficult to master.
XCOM 2
The battles are challenging and varied, full of terrible enemies with tricky, surprising abilities, but the biggest changes are found on the strategic level. You’ll travel all over the world, create cells, infiltrate black sites, hunt for more resources to use more powerful weapons and tools – it’s captivating and not just a side effect.
The game cleverly uses the scarcity of options to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any given time, you may have only six possible scan locations, while combat encounters are largely dictated by the game, but what you do with this narrow range of options is hugely important. You need to recruit new recruits; you need an engineer to build a communications facility to contact more areas; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons. You can’t have all of these options.
