Introduction

Not every strategy game requires a 100-hour campaign, a weekend-long session of Civilization VI, or a month-long, all-consuming playthrough of War In The East 2. It doesn’t even need to be a full 40-hour campaign like Star Wars Zero Company or XCOM.

Speaking for myself here, the older I get, and the more family responsibilities I accrue, the more I find myself longing for that same feeling of satisfaction but without the massive time investment required. That’s why I went to my favorite list of strategy games and picked 7 deep strategy games that will have you glued to your screen while you play, but they’ll let you go free and back to your busy day after about an hour.

So, if your kid is asleep, you just finished a long day and work and want to relax, or dinner is cooking and you have a couple of free minutes, this list is the one for you! Join me, and let me tell you all about the best 7 strategy games you can get done and over with in less than an hour. If you want to check out more of my lists, you can do so here for all kinds of recommendations!!

Into The Breach

Rare are the games I would be 100% certain that I would take with me to a deserted island. Into the Breach is one such title, because despite taking place on a very limited 8×8 grid, the amount of strategizing each one of the game’s three mech packs requires is a masterstroke of game design. You see, in Into the Breach, you’re at the helm of a team of time-travelling mechs fighting to save Humanity from Eiffel Tower-sized kaiju.

Most turn-based strategy games rely on randomness and hit percentages to keep things exciting and unpredictable, but Into the Breach goes completely the other way and gives the player all the information they need: Where the enemy unit will move, what it will attack, and even what kind of attack it’s going to do. The player’s job is to use this information to strategize around the subsequent actions of the enemy. This allows the player to use the enemy’s attacks against each other by manipulating their position, gives way for last-minute city-saving by smashing enemies into each other, and even just throwing them out of the map, or outright preventing them from spanning by occupying that square. Each squad is built around a specific playstyle, making replaying the game and discovering the intricacies of each one a gameplay experience in and of itself.

Shogun Showdown

Shogun Showdown is a turn-based combat roguelike with deckbuilding elements that’s all about attack timing and positioning. The game removes almost all fluff and keeps things highly strategic on its 2D side-scrolling plane. Players move left or right along a single line of tiles and queue up weapon attacks, unleashing deadly combinations against waves of enemies. Because every action taken advances one turn for everyone, combat is always a high-stakes game of chess where the player must be constantly on the lookout for the enemy’s intentions, be ready to avoid incoming strikes, and pick the perfect moment to strike. It’s a simple game to pick up and start playing without any need for a major tutorial or set-up. As each mission begins and ends, you’ll unlock new skills and build the best deck you can before eventually facing the shogun. It’s not the best game on the list, in my opinion, but its setting and simplicity certainly make it fit the bill of being over and done in less than an hour.

Mini Motorways

Like many games on this list, Mini Motorways is one of the permanent installs on my machine, and one of the first games I boot up when I’m bored and just want a game that’s simple to pick up (all you do is place roads around the map, connecting houses to their respective shopping districts), but deceptively deep in a way that it can keep me entertained and challenged for the duration of the map. Mini Motorways is the sort of game where every map will come to an end, no matter how good you are at it.

As mentioned in the last paragraph, your role is to play roads connecting housing of a given color to the shopping district of the same color. Let too much traffic accumulate (and it will), and the game will come to an end. The fun is all in seeing how long you’ll last, and discovering new strategies to make your road network as efficient as possible. There are dozens of cities to play, each with its own level of challenge. Not that the number of cities matters, because you’ll probably just pick one at random, play a round, and drop the game before you go back to whatever it was you’re doing. If you’ve got the time, going over every city in the challenging order is pretty great.

FTL: Faster Than Light

If there’s one OG game that will outlast us all, it’s going to be FTL: Faster Than Light. The indie darling that kickstarted the whole Kickstarter (pun intended) craze back in the early 2010s. This roguelike puts players in charge of a spaceship escaping a pursuing rebel fleet to save the Galactic Federation. Released at a time when players were used to managing hundreds of ships at once and managing full space empires, FTL’s refreshing new take on giving players control of each of the ship’s crew members and sub-systems felt as fresh as the morning air.

Each campaign is randomly generated, and each time things will go awry in very different ways. It might be because your oxygen module was destroyed and everybody suffocated to death, or because an enemy laser beam set your ship on fire, or maybe your crewmates were kidnapped by space alien pirates. Or maybe your ship just disintegrated or lost all its fuel, and now you’re stranded in a solar system, and nobody knows you’re there.

Words cannot describe how much I love FTL, and how many hours I have spent over the years in this game, since the first day it was released. I cannot recommend it enough. While it might last a little bit longer than most games on this list if we’re talking about a full campaign, single encounters won’t last more than just a couple of minutes, at most, so don’t worry if you can’t get it done in one sitting; your crew and ship will be waiting for you right where you left them.

ISLANDERS: New Shores

This summer vacation, I went out of my family home for two weeks, and without my powerful rig by my side, I was limited to playing on my aging laptop without wifi. Fortunately, right before I left, I purchased ISLANDERS: New Shores during the Steam Sale, and boy, did I have some great things to write about it. ISLANDERS is all about putting together a quaint and sleepy seaside town by setting up combos to gain points, and using said points to gain more buildings to set up more combos. Each island will last you for around 15 minutes before you reach the threshold to move forward and start a new one. It’s a short and addictive loop that had me booting up my computer to play for a couple of minutes at a time in between household chores.

The fact that you can also just plop a couple of buildings around and leave, and the game will auto-save for you every time, means that even if you’re extremely time-strapped, you can always play a little bit of it. It’s also a nice touch that ISLANDERS is extremely beautiful and doesn’t tax your rig at all. Highly recommend, and one of my favorite games of all time, by a long shot.

Balatro

Every time I mention Balatro in one of my articles, someone will comment saying that this isn’t a strategy game. Well, dear commenter, allow me to disagree. Just because you’re not pushing and shoving units around and issuing attack orders, it doesn’t mean you’re not long-term strategizing and mustering your forces (in this case, putting together a deck of overpowered cards).

The idea is deceptively simple, but it’s what the game makes with its concept that turned Balatro into one of the best deck-builders in the world, and a massive sales sensation. You’re playing Poker, but not really. You’re playing Poker on steroids. You start with a deck of regular cards and a mandatory score to beat, and each poker hand gives you a predetermined number of points. The rarer the hand, the bigger the number of points.

Things only go batshit insane from here on out. Your cards can be upgraded with several different modifiers, turning an ace into a card that can multiply the number of points, and your duke into a money-making machine, and some cards can even be turned to stone or used only once before they evaporate. At the end of each round, players can use their money to buy jokers: special cards that act as modifiers and form the basis of any build, with some of them creating combos that can go from the hundreds into the millions. Like many other deck-builders, Balatro is a game where the fun is in trying to break the game with insane builds. Each game of Balatro will last you probably 30 to 45 minutes before you either win or have to start again, with new jokers and decks unlocked. Just be mindful to not get distracted with your stove on.

9 Kings

If the relaxing mood of ISLANDERS: New Shores isn’t exciting enough for you, and you need action in your strategy games, then 9 Kings is quite possibly the next best thing. Don’t let yourself be fooled by its simple (but lovely) pixelated art style. Hiding behind its starting 3×3 grid and cards, it’s one of the best auto-battlers in gaming history, and I don’t mean this as an exaggeration. It’s truly that good.

In 9 Kings, you pick one of… Well, 9 Kings (you have to unlock them all first), and fight against other kings in several rounds until you and the last remaining king face off in a boss battle. Between each round, players can play their cards on a 3×3 grid and, with that, spawn units and buildings that give buffs and abilities to said units. As you defeat each auto-battle, you’ll be earning the cards from the king you just defeated, and use them to bolster your base and create new and more powerful combos. 9 Kings is the sort of game that lets players get away with the most insane of builds, and was specifically designed to allow players to completely break the game’s balance. There’s nothing as incredible as watching the golden Gatling gun towers of the King of Greed mow down unending hordes of enemy units in just a couple of seconds. Or watching the demons of the King of Blood explode and come back as summons.

Conclusion

I hope this list helps you out when you’re deciding how to occupy your next free hour! There are tons of other similar titles out there, and it seems that this sub-genre of quick-to-get-done and over-with strategy games is only getting more and more popular as time goes on. Possibly because the people designing them are also growing older and older, and with more and more responsibilities and laundry piling up all the same. Anyway, before I let you go on with your gaming session, let me know if you have any other recommendations for me! I’ll certainly be needing them in the next couple of months!

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