There is a rumor that mobile games are all casual, silly, throwaway things to play in the bathroom or while waiting for your Pop Tart to appear.
As this list shows, the Google Play Store is home to some of the deepest, richest, and most challenging strategy game experiences around. These titles will take you to WWII and Vietnam, the British Football League and Outer Space, and several fantastic worlds.
No matter where you are, you will have to keep your mind on yourself to survive.
It’s impossible not to love CUE – short for Cards, the Universe and Everything. Even if you don’t really like card shufflers, it’s so full of fun trivia and sweet humor that you can think of it as the mobile game cousin of the comedy show QI. This award winning educational game is suitable for all ages and lets you fight a dinosaur with a pharaoh, a pug with Loki and a bear with Zeus.
Gwent may have been the game that convinced CD Projekt that he had the midas touch. Originally designed to be a side-show in The Witcher 3, Gwent has proven to be so popular that it deserves a spinoff game in itself, allowing players who hone their skills against oddly familiar NPCs to take on other humans. Regular content drops and a winning backstory make this an essential card fighter.
This cleverly framed prequel to roguelike hit The Binding of Isaac sees you playing as a bum trying to get his stolen money back, but also as Isaac, inventing a game to distract himself from the horrors of his family life. From a gameplay perspective, this is an interesting and addicting card combat roguelike with a variety of “ugly but cute” bosses, dozens of items and trinkets to collect and upgrade, and 30 different enemies.
Developed by Dan Fornace and Tako Boy Studios, Creatures of Aether is a perfect card fighter, if you don’t think you’re quite ready to jump into a game of Gwent. He sees you building a deck and placing cards on a grid. Like a cartoon, a fantastic version of Risk, it’s about outdoing your opponent with numbers and trying to change the board to your suit. It’s not for hardcore card players, but it’s a great option for beginners.
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is often compared to Adventure Time, especially by me, and rightly so. Aesthetically and tonically, it could be a spin-off of Pendleton Ward’s surreal masterpiece. But this is not just a tribute. This wonderful card fight sequel lets you venture through a fantastic word via card placement. If you’ve ever played Slay the Spire (another great influence) you’ll know roughly what to expect.
Riot Games have taken their time bringing League of Legends to mobile. Before launching the excellent League of Legends: Wild Rift, he gifted us Legends of Runeterra, an immaculate card fighter based in the League of Legends universe. It features iconic regions and champions from that series, as well as a few characters all its own. There’s crafting, ranked play, and a lot more. He’s just a very solid card fighter, as you might expect.
Terafyn is a card-based RPG that takes you through a story campaign involving warring siblings, epic warfare, prophecies, and more. It’s an exceptional collection of lore, characters, puzzles, places, hand drawn characters, demigods, mythical creatures and all that good stuff. Combat, meanwhile, is turn-based and involves spinners. There is nothing else like it.
Radio Commander, from 911 Operator dev Games Operators, puts you in the shoes of a radio operator during the Vietnam War. You’ll use your radio to respond to soldiers’ orders on the battlefield, with only the radio chatter coming back to you and an annotated map letting you know what’s going on in the field. It’s an incredibly immersive, tense, and innovative approach to the real-time strategy genre.
When it comes to managing mobile football, there really is only one option. SEGA’s Football Manager 2021 Mobile has all the official licenses you could ask for, plus a revamped Dynamics system, new tactical models, new nations and years of cumulative experience. It’s a strategy game to get lost in – assuming you love football.
Maze Machina comes from the fertile mind of developer Arnold Rauers, whose strategy games have won a loyal following on mobile. He sees you playing as a little mouse trapped in an ever-changing mechanical labyrinth. Why? For the amusement of the villainous Automatron. The gameplay consists of sliding on a grid to move. The twist is that everything is moving in the same direction, which means you have to plan ahead to avoid robotic annihilation.
Like The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands before it, The Bonfire 2: Uncharted Shores is a sleek, stylish, and award-winning city builder where you find yourself stranded in a strange land. You need to establish a colony on a procedurally generated world map, positioning your structures to maximize their effectiveness, but you also need to fight monsters every night. Your only long-term hope is to obtain magical artifacts to defeat the ancient evil.
The games don’t get much more acclaim than Crying Suns. Inspired by Dune and FTL, it places you as a space commander and tasks you with exploring the ruins of a fallen empire and engaging in tactical battles. It’s a story driven experience, with each part filling up the game’s background a little more, making it almost endlessly replayable. If you liked FTL, you will love this.
There are a lot of great games out there, but only a few of them can legitimately be called masterpieces. Company of Heroes is definitely one of them. This addicting WWII real-time strategy game was released in 2006 and still regularly appears in the lists of the best strategy games – and now, thanks to Feral Interactive’s excellent Android port, it’s also on that list. .
Adapted by Dire Wolf Digital from the award-winning board game, Raiders of the North Sea is a worker-placement game that allows you to assemble a crew of rowboats and conquer the hapless peoples of the North Sea. Sure, there’s a bit more resource management and planning involved than in your typical Viking thread, but someone has to do it. Your reward: a glorious death.
Another conversion of the board game, this time the setting is Warhammer’s Age of Sigma, and more specifically Gaunt Summoner’s Silver Tower. You have to enter this tower and fight your way through waves of monsters in turn-based tactical battles. Fortunately, there are several champions on hand to help you out, all with their own unique skills and playstyles.
There’s nothing quite like Kingdom Two Crowns – other than Kingdom: New Lands of course. This insanely pretty pixelart strategy game lets you set up as a monarch, recruit subjects, build a kingdom, and defend it against hideous monsters. The main difference between this game and its predecessor is that you can play with another person, hunched over on the same device. Just make sure you live in the same household.
Magic: ManaStrike is a real-time strategy card game set on the unrivaled Magic: The Gathering franchise from Wizards of the Coast. It’s an accessible and fun card game, letting you choose a color, customize your spells, and jump straight into PvP matches with players from around the world. Planeswalkers are also making an appearance, bringing unique abilities to the melee. This is just a solid CCG from an established series.