Free strategy games

What are strategy games

A strategy game rewards thinking ahead. Instead of fast reactions, you make choices whose results show up later: where to put a farm, which route a ship should sail, which unit to send into a fight. Some strategy games run in real time and keep moving while you decide, others wait for you to finish your turn. Either way the fun is in watching a plan come together, and in working out what went wrong when it does not.

The strategy games on Kiloo cover a wide spread. Some are builders, where you grow a village, a moon base or a railway one piece at a time. Some are trading games, where you buy low in one place and sell high in another. Others are battles on a map against the computer, and two of them also let a friend take the other side on the same device. Many of them show you the numbers behind a choice, such as the damage before an attack in Siege Lords or what each network makes and owes in Colony Moon.

Strategy games to start with

If you like to build, start with Tiny Kingdom. You lay cobbled roads out of a stone keep, put farms by the water and lumber camps by the forest, keep the villagers fed and cheerful, and raise the keep into a castle. Island Council is calmer still and turn-based: each season you get a few actions, place tiles where their neighbours help them, and answer one petition from the council. Colony Moon asks more of you, because every module on the crater has to be joined by a tube before power, air, water or food can reach it.

For moving goods around, Steam Rails lets you drag track across the hills, bridge the river, tunnel through the ridge and send engines to carry coal between stations, over fifteen maps with their own goals. Trade Winds starts you with a sloop and a few coins and has you buying goods where they are cheap and selling them where they are short, while every crate you move shifts the price. Harbor Tycoon and Zoo Planner sit closer to management: you build a port that lands and sells cargo, or a zoo where each of fourteen species wants something different.

For battles, Siege Lords is turn-based tactics on a hex map, with knights, archers, pikemen, cavalry, catapults and healers and the exact damage shown before you commit. Territory is map conquest with dice, where you muster armies on a hand-drawn atlas and spread your colour. Bot Battalion is real-time: gather scrap, roll toy robots off the factory line and beat the opponent across the garage floor.

Controls, pace and playing on a phone

Every strategy game here works on desktop, tablet and phone. Most follow one pattern: click or tap what you want to build or move, then click or tap where it should go. You drag to lay roads in Tiny Kingdom, track in Steam Rails, tubes in Colony Moon and paths in Zoo Planner. Arrow keys or a drag pan the map, and + and − or a pinch zoom in. P pauses and M mutes in all of them, which helps in the real-time games when things get busy.

In Bot Battalion on a computer you drag to select bots and right-click to move them; on a phone you tap a group and then the floor. Siege Lords uses Tab to cycle units and E to end your turn, and Territory uses Space or R to roll the dice and Enter to end a phase. Undo is there when you need it: one undo in Siege Lords, while placing armies in Territory, and for the whole season in Island Council.

Frequently asked questions