#stratagery

Strategery by Affogato

Released: December 2008 

Size: 6.6MB 

Requirements: iPhone; iPad (universal, iOS 3.1 or newer)

Strategery is a very simplistic strategy game for iPhone and iPad, which I somehow managed to completely miss out till this September and even thought it to be quite new when I first found out about it. (I mean it has not even been updated in over a year and still I... Oh well, silly me...) The object of the game is to capture and control tiles on a randomly generated board, until you are either annihilated or become dominant on the realm of black/white background and colourful dots.

If you have ever played Risk (originally a board game and these days it, naturally, has been translated to mobile devices), Lux DLX or anything similar, you've got a good handle on the idea of the game. However, where Strategery differs from these games, is in its simplicity of design and randomness of the game board. The latter is always generated randomly in the beginning of the game (the player can keep recreating the board until he or she accepts the board). The simplicity part is quite obvious when you look at the game; Strategery takes the basic ideas of Risk and essentially removes everything else except for the game mechanism which it then simplifies to deliver this fine game. 

Comparison between the bright and dark background options.

The options of the gameplay are quite few in number. The player can choose from four map sizes and four difficulties; whether the bonus units received at the end of the turn are placed randomly, on borders or manually; whether the game starts with only one piece of land on every player or if the whole board has been divided among players and what colour the player wants to play with. The gameplay itself is very simple: one any tile you have that has at least two pieces ('dots') on it, you can attack a neighbouring tile; then you end the turn when you wish to do so or have moved all your pieces. The attacking is similarly simple: a die is rolled for every attacking and defending dot, and if the attackers roll is higher, he or she captures the tile.

Gameplay on iPhone.

What I found out to be much more fun than I expected was that, instead of playing the game on the biggest map size on my iPad, which brings the game experience very close to Risk and which I enjoyed a lot, I had much more fun playing the game on the smallest map size on my iPhone, a complete opposite to the approach I first took with the game. This way the game becomes a sort of an skirmish (à la "Rumble Pit" in Halo 3 (yes, three, it was and is the most magical one)) that only takes a minute or two, and can be immensely challenging and luck-based on the harder difficulties. This is the mobile side of the game and it plays out just fantastically.

The only negative thing I have about the game is that, as every map is appromaxitely a rectangle, five sides to the same battle seems like one too much. The thing is that one of the players is always spawned next to another one, and gets destroyed almost immediately, so I would rather have a total of four players on the map so that it would be a more equal fight. 

Otherwise I really like this game. Being an universal app, it's really nice to have both on my iPhone and my iPad, especially because the game turns out to have that diversity to it depending on the device you're playing it on (iPad being more tactical, Risk-que (pun intended), and iPhone the more skirmish variant). Like I wrote before: "...Strategery takes the basic ideas of Risk and essentially removes everything else except for the game mechanism which it then simplifies to deliver this fine game."