Free Strategy Games

The strategy games here run to two shapes. Tower defence gives you a route, a budget and something coming down it, and asks where to spend and when to upgrade rather than replace. Tycoon and management games give you a small business and a market that does not care about your plans, and ask what to make, what to charge and which of the things demanding money right now can wait until next week. Both punish the same mistakes: spending everything on what is in front of you, and never upgrading what you already own.

These are tuned to be genuinely difficult, and tuned deliberately rather than by feel. Before one ships, a scripted player good enough to win plays every campaign to the end — and, just as importantly, so do half a dozen deliberately flawed ones: a player who never upgrades, one who buys only a single kind of defender, one who ignores an entire threat, one who stops investing at the halfway mark, one who prices too high, one who takes every order going. Every one of them has to lose. A difficulty curve that only a bad player can fall off is a curve that means something.

Expect to lose a campaign before you win one, and expect the loss to be informative — the run that collapses on wave nine usually went wrong around wave four. Progress saves in your own browser, so a long campaign survives closing the tab.