Free strategy games
Every strategy game
3 games
Three games, each of them a grid, a turn and a line or a flank to find. Nothing here is real-time and nothing punishes you for taking a minute over a move.
Each one plays against the computer at three levels, or against another person on the same device — you take turns on one phone, which is what these games were for in the first place.
The three levels are three different opponents rather than three labels. Easy looks one move ahead and plays a loose move between a third and a half of the time. Medium looks four moves ahead and rarely does. Hard looks as deep as the game allows — nine moves in Tic Tac Toe and Four in a Row, seven in Reversi — and never plays a loose move at all. Nine moves is the whole of Tic Tac Toe, which is why Hard cannot be beaten there and can be everywhere else.
Undo behaves the same way in all three: it takes back your move and the computer’s reply together, so playing a line out to see why it fails costs you nothing. Every level keeps its own record, so a win over Easy is never filed as a win over Hard, and a two-player game counts towards neither — on one device, neither side is the one this browser is keeping a record for.
Which one should you play?
Play Tic Tac Toe for the shortest game there is, and to see what a solved game looks like: the hard level searches the whole game and never makes a mistake, so the best you can do against it is a draw. Easy makes real mistakes, and new game swaps who goes first, because going first is a genuine advantage.
Play Four in a Row when you want the same idea with room to plan. Seven columns, six rows, and gravity choosing the row for you — which means a threat you set up two moves ago can still be waiting under the disc your opponent has to play.
Play Reversi if you want the deepest of the three. Every move has to flank a line of your opponent’s discs to turn it over, corners can never be flipped, and holding fewer discs in the middle game is often the stronger position, because it leaves your opponent fewer legal places to play.
