Diversify your Skill Set by Trying out the Best Strategy Games Available

Learning how to adapt to all sorts of sub-genres will be the best way to become a strategy game master.

Don’t think of strategy as a genre of games in itself. It’s better to think of it as a broader category that has its own sub-genres. Exploring each of these sub-genres will be the key to diversifying your skills.

The classic category to start with is, of course, card games. Card games are perhaps the most accessible and potentially the most challenging because they often involve rules that are easy to learn but often incorporate luck-based elements that can be hard to adapt to on the fly.

Card games are a broad category and come in many forms. There are plenty of video games that are card-based and use certain tactics to win. There’s a long list of casino card games that involve brain teaser mechanics that can be played with any standard 52 card deck.

The inherent random nature of card games can be great for improving your ability to react and improvise on the fly. Thinking strategically isn’t just about learning the same parameters over and over but improving your ability to deal with unforeseen consequences as best as you can.

Strategy board games are a great way to test out your inner strategist, and lucky for you, many great options were released last year.

What makes these kinds of strategy games so important is that they often come with loads of rules. Board games in general have more rules than card games or something like chess, but this is precisely what makes them so nuanced.

Strategy board games will help develop your long-term planning more than anything else. They reward players who are patient, observant and have a good memory for not only the rules, but the habits of opponents from many rounds prior.

For fans of more fast-paced games that require shorter-term decision making, it’s hard to top a turn-based tactics game. This is a sub-genre that is popular in the world of video games.

Whether the style of the game is focusing on combat, stealth or resource management, all turn-based tactics games have a few things in common. The skill set necessary to win in these games has to do with making confident plays after measuring and analyzing as many factors as possible. They’re not the same as deduction games, but they also involve being highly observant and coming to the most sensible conclusion in a timely manner.

If you want to increase your short-term tactical thinking and discover game types that combine action with strategy, then a turn-based tactics game will be for you.

On the other side of the table of turn-based tactics are real-time strategy games which are considerably more complex. Like board games focused on strategy, these games have a lot of rules, and it will often take players a few hours of experimenting before they get a good grasp on the rules and the methods.

With turn-based tactics, you have all the time in the world to plan your move before your opponent’s turn. But with real-time strategy, you need to think in the moment and act as things are happening. It’s a much more realistic form of strategizing, and as a result these games tend to be considerably more difficult.

The skill sets you’ll develop as you play these kinds of games are quite unique. They’re not the same as with board games despite similarly expansive maps, and they’re also different from the skills needed to play role playing games, which tend to focus on grinding or mixing and matching. A real-time strategy match will feel like information overload at times. Players who have the best reaction times, the best understanding of all their units’ specifications, and the best ability to handle multiple attacks coming in simultaneously will fare well.

One of the newer sub-genres of strategy games around are tower defense titles, which are particularly popular as mobile games. Tower defense games can often feel like a combination of turn-based tactics and real-time strategy games since they tend to be very fast paced but still rely on long-term thinking over short-term.

The objective of these games is to protect a homebase from incoming waves of enemies. It’s an interesting twist on the strategy genre that normally has players taking the offensive rather than the defensive.

Tower defense games are a great choice for players who enjoy studying maps and terrains more than weaponry. Success in these types of games tends to rely more on mastering the landscape rather than mastering spears and arrows. It’s also a great rush, since you’re always outnumbered. They’re not usually realistic depictions of strategizing, but they sure are unique and clever.

The classic strategy game subgenre is definitely the warfare category, sometimes called wargaming or war games. They can share a lot in common with real-time strategy and board games, and in fact the three of them often overlap.

Warfare games tend to be the most analytical. They deal with specific operations that can involve the acquisition of new forces for later use, resources for stockpiling and other tasks modeled after real-life battles. They tend to be a complex mix of short-term and long-term strategizing, usually prioritizing the latter.

They are fantastic at developing skill sets related to teamwork, communication and decisions making – making the kind of difficult decisions that always make you feel like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.