Strategy games

Planning is the skill strategy games reward: resources are limited, every move spends something, and a careless choice early on can cost you much later. There are around 460 on this shelf, and card solitaire makes up a large share: Klondike, the classic seven-column game, has close to 40 versions, and with TriPeaks, FreeCell, Pyramid, Spider and the general solitaire titles the family comes to about 145. The rest divides between some 110 strategy games proper, such as tower defence and army battles, around 70 board games including checkers, battleship and tic-tac-toe, a set of chess games, and roughly 65 card games, from deckbuilders to multiplayer matches.

Defend the Castle shows the tower defence side well: you hold a castle against wave after wave by building walls, archers and cannons with gold and wood. AOD - Art Of Defense carries the same idea into a post-apocalyptic world with heroes to lead and towers to upgrade. Emberdeck is a deckbuilding roguelite built around burn damage, climbing a burning spire one fight at a time.

A hand of solitaire or a round of tic-tac-toe fits a short pause. FreeCell asks for a little more time and thought: every card is dealt face up, so almost every deal can be won by planning ahead. Tower defence campaigns and deckbuilders are for evenings, because their payoff comes from choices that build on each other over many rounds. With every game free and nothing to install, trying a few kinds of solitaire before settling on a favourite is easy.