The 10 Best Mobile Strategy Games

Whether it’s short rounds of Clash Royale or the long scenarios/short sessions of Plague Inc, strategy is one of the best genres for mobile gaming. Many strategy and tactics games are far easier to control with the touch screen of a modern phone than with any controller. What’s more, with no need for complex animations and detailed graphics, even older phones shouldn’t have any problem playing the best mobile strategy games.

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What makes a great mobile strategy game isn’t just the tactical depth or the bite-sized missions, but the delicate balance between the two. Few players look for mobile titles to play at their own leisure. It’s more likely that they’re trying to fill time while moving or when waiting in line. That’s why the ability to stop and start at any moment takes priority when talking about any mobile game.

10

Into the Breach

Into the Breach is a turn-based tactics game from Subset Games, well known among strategy fans for their space combat roguelike FTL: Faster Than Light. Into the Breach takes the formula of Fire Emblem and Advanced War and adds a roguelite twist: every time the player is defeated, and they often will be, they’ll send help back in time to an alternate timeline, making their next attempt just a little easier.

The mobile port of Into the Breach is available at no additional cost to Netflix subscribers, but it can’t be bought normally. Good news for those subscribed to the streaming service, while everyone else still has plenty of alternate choices for their mobile strategy game.

9

Door Kickers

Door Kickers and Frozen Synapse aren’t quite like any other strategy game before them, and of the two, Door Kickers is easily the more complete, polished product. They play a bit like the planning phase in old Rainbow 6 titles, where the player uses a bird’s eye view of the action zone to plan the movement of a SWAT team.

Being developed as a PC game first, the game is full of different weapons, gadgets, and characters to unlock and experiment with. A mix of bite-sized missions and many different angles from which to approach them makes Door Kickers an engaging strategy game in a form factor that’s ideal for mobile gaming.

8

Rusted Warfare

Rusted Warfare is a real-time strategy game in the vein style of Command and Conquer. It is a multiplayer-focused game with no microtransactions and no hidden fees, which is itself a rarity among mobile games. It also has challenges and a skirmish mode to play offline against the computer.

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Rusted Warfare doesn’t have much in the way of a story and its presentation isn’t particularly pleasant. All in all though, for players looking for a straightforward retro RTS, this cheap mobile title delivers that with confidence while punching far above its weight.

7

The Battle For Polytopia

The Battle for Polytopia is like a much simpler Civilization: a turn-based strategy game based on extending an empire with some unique quirks while pursuing either an economic or a military victory. Along the way, players can invest points harvested from their most prosperous cities into expanding their abilities.

From the more varied warfighting of archers and knights to the border expansions brought by farming and fishing, every point invested can completely change the way the game is played. The Battle for Polytopia also has multiplayer, which is unlocked by buying one of the premium civilizations, the cheapest of which only costs around a dollar.

6

The Battle for Wesnoth

The Battle for Wesnoth is quite an old game, having originally been released as open source for Linux machines in the early 2000s. As a result, this game is not as demanding as many other mobile ports, and it’s nearly infinitely expansible thanks to years of custom content.

Battle for Wesnoth takes some inspiration from the Advance Wars series, swapping the tiles for a hex grid and the cartoony modern war for a fantasy theme. The biggest innovation in Battle for Wesnoth is that surviving units can be recalled from previous fights instead of being recruited, which is cheaper as well as making them level up faster.

5

Partia

At first glance, Partia looks just like a Fire Emblem game that didn’t get as much budget for art as its peers. Even when exploring all the different systems, even after getting a good way into the game, this feeling doesn’t go away. Even without details like the rock-paper-scissor combat, where spears beat swords and swords beat axes, Partia seems designed in every aspect to appeal to nostalgic fans of the series.

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What might have contributed to the extended Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones homage that is Partia is the popularity of GBA emulation, and of Fire Emblem in particular, on mobile phones. Partia is an exceptional Tactics RPG, but on mobile, it’s competing with some of the best in the genre.

4

Warbits

Much like Chucklefish’s Wargroove, Warbits is based on the core loop of Advanced Wars but manages to turn the whole system upside down. The premise of this adorable iOS exclusive is simple: why make war when one can simulate war instead? That might sound silly, but it’s a fix to a real problem.

Making the war in Warbits an in-universe game dissipates much of the awkwardness around the Advanced War-like modern battles. On top of that, Warbits is extremely polished for a mobile-only game, with beautiful art and a distinctive presentation. It even has asynchronous multiplayer, meaning that friends don’t have to schedule in advance to play together.

3

Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics is widely considered to be one of the best entries in the genre. Besides its name, this tactics-based RPG has little to do with Square Enix’s JRPG saga. Still, when the spin-off was first released in 1997, Final Fantasy had just broken into the mainstream in the west.

Final Fantasy Tactics looks and play a lot like most other tactics RPGs, except with a much stronger emphasis on its story and more customizable characters. As for the mobile port, it’s based on the updated War of the Lions version, which was originally developed for PSP, and boasts new cutscenes, characters, and events, as well as an improved translation.

2

Clash Royale

Clash Royale is one of the most popular mobile games of all time, and for very good reason. Being a multiplayer-only game that’s over five years old, new players might find that getting up to speed takes longer than with most single-player games. Structured around bite-sized gaming sessions, Clash Royale pits two players against each other in three-minute-long matches.

In a mix of deckbuilding, tower defense, and real-time strategy, players have to use the units and spells in their deck to defend their side of the field and destroy the enemy’s towers. While Clash Royale can quickly become repetitive, scaling the rank and seeing new content being added does spice things up occasionally.

1

Plague Inc:

2012’s disease management smash hit is just as good today as it was ten years ago. In Plague Inc​​​​​​, the player is the virus, micromanaging its mutations to prepare a lethal, infectious pandemic. Even with its barebones presentation, the depth of this pandemic simulation is still unmatched among mobile gaming.

The hook of Plague Inc, of helping a deadly pandemic take over the world, might have gone from darkly humorous to actively repelling for many players. While many might be immediately repelled by the theme, Plague Inc is more Don’t Look Up than Contagion: this is the sort of satire that lets players explore how our safety systems can crumble under historical events while spreading a horde of infectious vampires to the new continent with bird migration.

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