featured image

Games are planned experiences for players. The best strategy games present significant intellectual challenges and the ability to plan and execute a variety of strategies. Other games offer players emotional experiences such as excitement, pleasure or even fear. Your game will be based on strategy, not luck in determining the course of the game. This means that the player’s ability to make decisions is of great importance to the outcome of the game. Luck-based elements can be unfair if one player rolls a set of high numbers and another player rolls a set of low numbers too many times, so the win may not depend on how good the players were.

When players have the option to choose the actions they want to take, victory is the result of those better choices and experienced players have a much better experience. Good games offer players multiple choices per round, the relative value of which may or may not be known. Good games can allow for multiple different paths to victory, allowing players to formulate different strategies at the start of the game or change them as the game’s status changes. Good games make all players feel competitive throughout the game, so games to eliminate players are not ideal. Below we have listed the best strategy games.

Here is the list of best strategy games

StarCraft 2

There are games that simply turn out to be the pillars of the genre, often copied but never quite matched. StarCraft was one such game for the RTS genre, so it only makes sense that its successor simply offers more of the same in a glossier package. Even ten years after its initial release, StarCraft 2’s presentation still amazes. The campaign makes good use of the races loved by StarCraft fans. The bombastic combat is undoubtedly the heart of the experience, total attacks that are satisfying to watch after you’ve invested time building your armies.

StarCraft II is a strong multiplayer game. Your enemies are human; they can probably click faster than you and spend orders faster than you. You will lose a lot, but you will get better the more you play, and that makes this game a very good RTS for those who are competitive. The PvE campaign is also striking, as a story in RTS games is difficult to convey. Many developers resort to cutscenes or dialogue during missions, but in StarCraft II you interact with the world outside the combat.

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 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 tribute to Settlers and Age of Empires, but challenged us with its clever expansion system that forces you to carefully plan your growth into new areas. The weather is also important. You’ll need to prepare carefully for winter, but lore has it that if you have better warm-weather gear than your enemies, you can gain a strategic advantage.

Commander in Chief 2

Supreme Commander 2 from Gas Powered Games probably doesn’t deserve the word ‘Supreme’ in the title, but changing the title would negate 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 wider (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 in 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 give orders to another unit miles away. As an army mass – in sprawling columns of hundreds of robots – you will be 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 one battle, but SupCom goes even further, with artillery, long-range nuclear weapons and megalithic experimental bots.

Crusader Kings III

Crusader Kings 3 has given the series’ previously opaque interface a major overhaul, making it a welcome offering for new players while retaining much of the depth that the series is known for. Crusader Kings 3 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. They are all driven and ambitious and often turn into a moody child if they don’t get their way. It is a great responsibility to adopt them. They can be greedy, cruel, pious, horny, constantly drunk – if you search for an adjective, you will find it.

XCOM2

Combat is challenging and varied, full of terrible enemies with tricky, surprising skills, but the biggest changes can be found at the strategic level. You travel 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 makes clever use of the scarcity of options to force you into tricky dilemmas. At any given time, you may only have six possible scan locations, while combat encounters are largely determined by the game, but what you do with this limited range of options is hugely important. You need to recruit new recruits; you need engineer to build communication facility to contact more areas; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons. You cannot have all these options.

card thief

Card Thief is one of the more unique strategy games. It is a mix of strategy and card game. Your goal is to move in such a way that you are not detected. You’ll have gear, stealth points, and more to help you dodge the guards and complete the level. 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 new way that makes the most of their digital home with complex strategy and unique elements that would be hard to put on the tabletop. It’s fast-paced, addictively fun – as all mobile games should be – with great strategic depth that is hard to master.

Last words

Best Strategy games are the quintessential PC genre that has kept us busy since the dawn of PC gaming with maps, army lists, and building instructions. And it’s one of the most diverse genres, appealing to everyone from hardcore opponents to those who just want Gandhi to destroy Montezuma. In this list you will find everything from fast competitive RTS games to long 4X games. If you want history, we’ve got it. Science fiction? Yes, some of it. Fantasy too. For a multi-title series, we chose what we think is the best game to play right now. We can offer more than one game from the same series if we think they are different enough to play both.