It isn’t rare for me to hear people say that “strategy games are too complex” or “too time-consuming”, and even “they’re just too complicated and convoluted”, amongst my circle of friends, and all around the internet. While that might be true in some cases, it’s far from being the norm, and the problem usually arises when people try to immediately jump into the most complicated of strategy titles around. So, to help you avoid this pitfall, and if you’re the kind of gamer who’s looking to jump into strategy games, and everything looks so intimidating, this is the list for you.
I’ll go over the games that I consider to be simple enough that they’re easy to pick up and play without any meaningful time investment, but also games that offer you depth, a rewarding gameplay loop, and will give you plenty of space to improve and jump to other, more complex strategy titles later down the line. I’ll feature real-time strategy games, turn-based strategy, and even some strategy-roguelikes, which are quite the norm nowadays.
10 – FTL: Faster Than Light
Let’s start strong, with one of the best strategy games for beginners, with FTL: Faster Than Light, one of my all-time favorites! Managing a single starship across a hostile galaxy is the perfect introduction to the strategy-roguelike structure. Focus on “single starship”, and not “starships”. By limiting your focus to a handful of crew members and specific ship systems, the game prevents the choice paralysis often found in grander strategy titles and the overwhelming wave of stats and colorful menus.
As you navigate its sectors, the depth reveals itself naturally. You start by worrying about oxygen and shields, but soon you find yourself timing ion blasts to disable enemy medbays. It is a masterclass in manageable complexity, rewarding those who stick around to master its nuances. There’s a lot of content here, with secrets to find and ships to unlock. The main campaign is hard, and you’re expected to fail, so just embrace it, and frustration is sure to be kept at bay.
9 – XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Firaxis succeeded in making the tactical turn-based genre approachable without sacrificing the tension of a life-or-death struggle, and proved that accessibility is possible in strategy, and even essential to create what is now recognized as one of the best strategy games of all time: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The tutorial eases you into the dual-layer gameplay of base management and field operations, while the ability to bypass these early hand-holding sessions in subsequent runs keeps the momentum high for returning players. The difficulty curve is remarkably smooth (with a couple of interesting difficulty spikes here and there), allowing you to grow alongside your soldiers as their abilities become more specialized.
The game design rewards long-term planning alongside tactical acumen. You learn to respect the importance of high cover and the value of a well-placed grenade, and these lessons compound as the alien threat escalates. The turn-based combat gives you all the time ot think before you commit to a decision, so there’s no stress there too. With numerous options to customize the challenge, it remains a flexible sandbox for anyone to try, and XCOM 2 is equally great and easy to get into. It’s also extremely cheap on every Steam sale.
8 – Mini Motorways
Mini Motorways is a rare example of a strategy game that manages to be both stressful and deeply meditative. The difficulty scales organically, starting with a single house and a building before expanding into a sprawling metropolitan nightmare where you have to connect everything together and avoid traffic from piling up too much, or the game is lost. This gradual increase in pace allows you to learn the subtle art of traffic flow and urban planning without being buried under a mountain of statistics or menus. Every game will be lost, eventually, so just have fun with what you can do.
The minimalist aesthetic serves a functional purpose, stripping away visual noise so you can immediately identify where your bottlenecks are occurring. Failure here doesn’t feel like a defeat but rather the natural conclusion of a city’s growth, encouraging you to immediately jump back in and try a different highway configuration. Maybe it was not your intersection; maybe all you needed was a roundabout. Also, you can play it on the Switch, too!
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