16 Best Turn-Based Strategy Games To Play In 2025

The Banner Saga

Developer: Stoic Studio
Release date: January 14, 2014
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox One, Android, iOS

If you want story depth without as much time spent in menus, then The Banner Saga is definitely worth checking out. What it lacks in depth on the battlefield, it more than makes up for with a web of choices you make for the good and ill of the tribe you lead. Decisions large and small, from whether to believe claims of injustice to whether to save certain characters from death all influence how the story unfolds and which characters will fight with you to the end. That’s not to say The Banner Saga lacks tactical complexity, though–far from it. Units have health pools, of course, but also armor levels that mitigate damage and willpower, an expendable resource that governs movement, similar to action points, and can increase how much damage an attack deals.

If you enjoy the first game, consider picking up its two sequels as well.

Read our Banner Saga review.

Into the Breach

Developer: Subset Games
Release date: February 27, 2018
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS

Into the Breach might look like a minimalist take on turn-based strategy games, but that’s just a feint. Its tiny maps and scant handful of units mask considerable depth and some of the best improvements to the genre in years. The idea is this. You control members of a small resistance force fighting back against an invasion of robots called Vek, and the goal is not just to defeat Vek on each map, but to keep them from destroying as many buildings as possible. Destroyed buildings deplete humanity’s power source, and once that meter hits zero, your campaign is done.

On the bright side, every time you make a move, you can see what the enemy’s next move will be, and even if your units face defeat, their mechs return in the next battle–just without their pilot and whatever unique bonuses that pilot brought with them. It’s a strong blend of challenge and approachability that, along with the manageable map sizes and mission briefs, makes Into the Breach tough to put down.

Read our Into the Breach review.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Developer: Intelligent Systems
Release date: July 26, 2019
Platforms: Nintendo Switch

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a refined version of Intelligent System’s split-narrative approach from the Fates games on Nintendo 3DS, with four full stories crammed into one package and more than three dozen playable characters–not that you’ll ever be able to play as all of them. Three Houses forces you to choose a side after the first act, then makes you deal with the consequences of that choice, which usually takes the form of fighting against allies you once counted among your friends. That might sound a lot like Fates, but the Three Houses difference is that these are the same friends you spent every day learning and bonding with before The Big Break.

Battles are typical of Fire Emblem, with one important exception. Your small band of archers, mages, warriors, and the like take on far larger armies, and gradually develop relationships amongst each other as they grow used to living and fighting together. What makes Three Houses’ battles different is that it uses an open class system, where any character can learn any of the more-than-two-dozen classes, with a few silly exceptions thanks to archaic gender locking. That flexibility lets you fine-tune your scholastic army like never before and makes it easier to use characters you like, instead of prioritizing function and power.

Read our Fire Emblem: Three Houses review.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Developer: Firaxis Games
Release date: December 2, 2022
Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

You might’ve heard folks describe Marvel’s Midnight Suns as Fire Emblem with superheroes, and that’s mostly true. Midnight Suns, more than most Marvel games, digs into relationships between characters in a way that makes it feel a lot like Fire Emblem. Sure, you can’t get married and genetically engineer a generation of preternaturally powerful teenagers, but Midnight Suns does delve into surprisingly deep and timely topics about morality and justice.

It’s more than just a relationship game, though. Firaxis added a card-based element to combat that makes Midnight Suns unlike most other turn-based strategy games, since you have to roll with the cards you’re dealt and make the most of every situation. You’re controlling a band of superheroes, so you’re hardly confined to weak little attacks, but there’s still an extra layer of strategy that makes you feel very smart indeed for pulling off every victory.

Read our Marvel’s Midnight Suns review.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp

Developer: WayForward
Release date: April 21, 2023
Platforms: Nintendo Switch

Re-Boot Camp is a remake of the first two Advance Wars games, both of which originally released on the Game Boy Advance, and while it doesn’t make dramatic changes to either, it doesn’t really need to. Both Advance Wars games hold up exceptionally well, and Re-Boot Camp made small alterations to enemy behavior so they actually act like they’re in a fight for survival and do things like defend their HQ.

Both Advance Wars games split their battles into two types. One has you start with a fixed number and variety of units and plays out almost like a puzzle, pushing you to figure out how to get the most from your limited resources. The other is more open-ended, with factories and similar locations where you can generate new units–for a price. The priorities in these battles are capturing properties to generate revenue, blocking opponents from scooping up the best-positioned locations, and building the right units at the right time. It’s intense, complex, and incredibly rewarding when you pull off a winning strategy.

Read our Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp review.

Wargroove

Developer: Chucklefish
Release date: February 1, 2019
Platforms: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC

Wargroove is a spiritual succesor to Advance Wars with more than a touch of fantasy thrown in to keep things fresh and interesting. Campaign mode sees you play as a young ruler traveling across the world in a bid to save her kingdom, and your allies are your army commanders, who can be a regular knight or dog legionnaire because why not.

You’ve got your usual mix of artillery, infantry, and heavy armored units, along with kingdom-specific units, and commanders play a vital role in each battle. Not only are they typically stronger than your standard units, but they also have unique abilities–similar to CO powers in Advance Wars–that can turn a battle around in an instant, if you use them the right way. There’s an extensive map creation tool and multiplayer as well, if you want to duke it out with friends on fiendish maps of your own making.

Read our Wargroove review.

XCOM 2

Developer: Firaxis Games, Feral Interactive
Release date: February 5, 2016
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Android, iOS

XCOM 2 is the quintessential squad-based strategy game, a deep and challenging sci-fi saga that turns some of the genre’s most well-worn conventions on their heads. For one thing, you’re always vastly outnumbered against your alien foes. XCOM 2 isn’t just a resistance game. It’s a gueriilla warfare game, and one of the most important things you can do is figure out the best way to stay unseed for as long as possible while you set up your ambushes.

That’s just the start, though. You’ll have to figure out the best skills and upgrades for your squad and come up with the right combination for each mission as well, and with how unforgiving XCOM 2 can be, those considerations are more important than usual. Best of all, though, is how varied each mission is, as the brief usually goes beyond eliminating every foe. Heck, even in the tutorial mission, your goal is retrieving data and blasting your way out of a lab to make a quick, hopefully safe escape.

Read our XCOM 2 review.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

Developer: Dancing Dragon Games
Release date: June 10, 2022
Platforms: PC

Symphony of War looks like another retro-style Fire Emblem-alike at first glance, with its 2D gameplay, medieval-adjacent themes, and familiar unit styles. There’s quite a lot more going on here, though. Leaders command squads of multiple fighters on the battlefield, so before combat even breaks out, you have to plan a strong combination of unit types and hope they cover each other’s weaknesses well enough or are so overpowered that it won’t matter.

Symphony of War includes over 50 unit types as well, so there’s plenty of room for experimentation–perfect if you’re not a fan of strategy games that only allow for one or two solutions to a given problem. Maintaining your army’s morale and breaking the enemy’s plays a key role in each encounter, and you’ll even have to make concessions for how the weather might influence your army’s accuracy, among other things.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and Sparks of Hope

Developer: Ubisoft Paris
Release date: August 29, 2017 | October 10, 2022
Platforms: Nintendo Switch

Both Mario + Rabbids games, Kingdom Battle and Sparks of Hope, are essentially Mario meets XCOM, but since Ubisoft’s Rabbids are involved, it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, and their Rabbid counterparts form squads, move in a grid, pull off overwatch attacks, avoid enemy sightlines, and use a vast array of skills to take down their foes–again, basically Mario XCOM.

The Mushroom Kingdom brand of whimsy and Rabbid chaos do a lot to make both games feel unique, though. Rabbid Peach sends out exploding RC cars, for example, while Yoshi uses a gatling gun. Mario can specialize in close-range hammer attacks that send enemies flying off the stage, or opt for fire-infused laser guns that ignite foes and make them flee in desperation. Battles are spaced out quite well, too, with chunks of exploration and simple puzzle solving to keep things from feeling like a slog.

Read our Kingdom Battle review and Sparks of Hope review.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

Developer: Too Kyoo Games
Release date: April 24, 2025
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch

Last Defense Academy is part visual novel, where you follow the triumphs and tribulations–but mostly tribulations–of a group of students tasked with defending the world from invaders, and part tactics game where you fend off those invaders while protecting a defensive barrier. Battles are dramatic, multi-wave events that force you to think about risk and sacrifice in unique ways. You get a set number of action points to use on attacks and movement each turn and, eventually, far more characters than action points, though you can gain extra points by defeating elite enemies. Deciding which character to attack, on which front, and against which foe often makes Last Defense Academy feel more like a puzzle game than a strategy one, though its unique flexibility means there’s usually more than one correct solution.

All attacks earn voltage, which you can spend to power up a single character for the remainder of the fight or use to execute a special attack that leaves the character stunned and vulnerable the next turn. They can also use their special when their HP is close to zero, and since dead characters come back to life in the next wave, death ends up being one of the most important tools in your kit.

The story is best experienced without spoilers, so we won’t say much here. Suffice to say that if you’ve played Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s games or the Zero Escape games from Kotaro Uchikoshi, you still won’t be quite prepared for the all the places that Last Defense Academy goes or just how deep it gets.

Civilization 6

Developer: Firaxis Games
Release date: October 21, 2016
Platforms: PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch

Civilization 7 is here, and in the grand old Firaxis tradition, that means it’s the best time to play the previous Civilization. Now that the studio has moved on to something else, Civ 6’s numerous updates, leader packs, new features, and other improvements are finally all together in one place–well, and a lot of DLC too–and it’s easily the most polished and feature-rich version of the strategy game yet.

Religion is more robust and plays an active role in your civilization’s development, you can customize your cities and have to pay more attention to how sustainable their growth is, and diplomacy evolves as you progress through the ages, encouraging you to adapt different playstyles depending on the time period. It’s wonderfully dense and rewarding, and that’s before you even factor in expansions such as Rise and Fall, with its complex network of loyalties to manage, and Gathering Storm, which lets the environment play a long-overdue role in how your civilization and others develop.

Read our Civilization 6 review.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Developer: Suspicious Developments
Release date: August 22, 2024
Platforms: PC

Tactical Breach Wizards combines the approachability of Into the Breach with the fancifulness of something like Mario + Rabbids, and it’s absolutely brilliant. An ex-marine, a private investigator-slash-witch, and, eventually, a few other oddballs team up to bring down the city’s senior traffic warden, who also happens to be a nefarious warlock involved in shady espionage. “Bring down” in Tactical Breach Wizards almost always means “blasting out of a window” using explosives, magic, and other supernatural tools, though other strategies occasionally work as well. It’s unexpectedly deep despite the breezy premise, but also patient enough to let you figure out the best ways to play for yourself without any pressure. The goal is to complete each small stage in as few turns as possible, though there’s no penalty for taking as long as you need, and you can replay them at any time.

Gears Tactics

Developer: The Coalition, Splash Damage
Release date: April 28, 2020
Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC

Who knew Gears, the crunchy, gory, hardcore action shooter series, would make such a good turn-based strategy game? The answer is Gears 5 maker Splash Damage, who adapted the series across genres in splendid fashion. Gears’ gritty sci-fi setting, full of factories, burned-out battlefields, and wastelands, lends itself perfectly to the kind of movement-and-cover-based game Splash Damage created, and it’s fantastically evocative as well. Gears Tactics also has some of the genre’s best character progression, with meaningful new tools and abilities to unlock that let you go deep with strategy and customization. A fluffy spin-off this is not.

Fuga: Melodies of Steel

Developer: CyberConnect2
Release date: July 28, 2021
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

Fuga is not your typical turn-based strategy game or your typical anything, for that matter. A small group of anthropomorphic wolf-like children pilot a massive tank in a bid to stave off an invading army and keep their families safe. If using a magical tank that far outsizes anything the enemy possesses seems a bit unfair, that’s because it is, though the advantage comes with a cost. The kids’ weapon is an ancient artifact from a mysterious civilization, and it takes careful planning and good teamwork to maintain well. Fuga’s strategic planning involves managing supplies and relationships as much as it does battles, and how you handle those elements will have a direct effect on your wartime preparedness. If things get rough, there’s also the tank’s ultimate weapon: The soul cannon. The catch? You have to sacrifice an ally to use it, and while you might think you can easily get through the campaign without resorting to such drastic measures–you’re probably wrong.

Battletech

Developer: Harebrained Schemes
Release date: April 24, 2018
Platforms: PC

Battletech takes turn-based strategy to the stars and puts you in control of a warring house stuck in a decades-long conflict between galactic nobility. You’re in charge of a fleet of 30 different types of mech fighters and manage everything from repairs when they start to get old, to decals and customization, and, of course, picking the right damage and defensive systems for the right job. Deploying your army and winning a battle is just half of Battletech, though. You’ll also need to manage your reputation with opposing factions, handle conflicts as they arise at your base, and invest in new mech developments. If you need a break from the campaign, you can jump into some PvP battles against friends or test strategies in skirmish mode against computer-controlled enemies as well.

Read our Battletech review.