Strategy Games You Can Think About All Day

Games where the better plan wins. The deep classics anchor the shelf: Chess, Go (capture-style, the cleanest way in for new players), Checkers, Reversi, Backgammon and Gomoku, plus the other great chess traditions in Xiangqi, Shogi and Janggi.

The abstract corner is where strategy fans find new favorites: wall off the maze in Quoridor, break the king out in the Viking game Hnefatafl, connect coast to coast in Hex (a game with no draws, ever), twist quadrants in Pentago, form mills in Nine Men's Morris, and try the asymmetric hunt of Bagh-Chal, where four tigers face twenty goats. Amazons and Battleship round out the set.

Real-time planners get Tower Defense: place, upgrade and sell towers through escalating waves, with a boss at the end. Every opponent here plays honestly at easy, medium and hard, every board highlights your legal moves, and nothing needs a download. Pick one game and go deep: strategy games repay the second hundred matches more than the first.