The research

How we picked and tested

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Before we could test strategy games, we had to face the tricky task of defining what they actually are. It turns out there isn’t an agreed-upon standard for what makes a game a strategy game, even within the tabletop gaming industry. As a result, categorizing them often means relying on some combination of mechanics and perceived complexity, plus a general gut feeling.

This “I know it when I see it” vibe made it difficult to gauge which games we wanted to test. So we spoke with the manager of The Brooklyn Strategist, a board-game shop and café in Brooklyn, and Eric Yurko, a board-game reviewer and committee member for the American Tabletop Awards. Armed with their expertise and our own research, we chose to focus on games that heavily emphasize decision-making skills, that are more complex than the picks in our guide to beginner board games, and that usually take between 45 minutes and two hours to play.

After vetting expert recommendations, reading dozens of Board Game Geek entries, and analyzing reviews from sources like IGN, Wargamer, and Shut Up & Sit Down, we ended up with a shortlist of 13 strategy games to test.

We made a special effort to include a mix of games with different mechanics and genres—economic games, war games, engine-building games, hidden movement games, and even a deduction game. We also looked for—and were pleasantly surprised to find—games that had rules for solo play. This is a great option, considering how hard it can be to get players to the table for some of these games. For some game groups, strategy games can be intimidating because they ask more from players (in terms of time, concentration, and energy) than more-casual games do.

We played every game at least twice, with different player counts in each instance. We included players with a wide variety of gaming backgrounds and experience, including friends and colleagues. As we played, we took notes on things like playing time, how easy it was to teach and learn the game, what it was like to set up the game, how the pieces felt, and (most importantly) how fun the overall experience was. We also tried to find the context (meaning the vibe, number of players, and situations) in which the game might fit best.

Finally, we talked about the gameplay experience as a group, and we incorporated everyone’s thoughts into our notes. One thing we did not do was test every game with the same group of people. This was partially because it’s more fun to bring as many people as possible into the process. But it was also to ensure that our testers weren’t jaded: If we’d played all of the games with the same group, we’d have lost the perspective of a less-experienced player by the end of the testing process.

A complex game of woodland war: Root

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Top pick

How it’s played: Root is a devilishly tough and layered asymmetric war game disguised as a fairytale romp. It pairs an intricate ecosystem of mechanics, strategic decisions, and narrative with great artwork, featuring adorably anthropomorphized woodland creatures.

Players assume the role of one of four factions—each with unique abilities, restrictions, and goals—in an attempt to rule the woodland map they share. For instance, the Marquis de Cat wants to build and defend as many outposts as possible, expanding and building rapidly throughout the forest. Meanwhile, the Woodland Alliance’s mice spread sympathy among the residents of the forest, fomenting uprisings that burn down the Marquis de Cat’s industries and sabotaging the other players whenever possible.

The factions compete to control the different clearings in the forest, earning points by fulfilling their individual goals. The game continues until one player reaches 30 points or completes the demands of a “dominance” card—essentially a unique victory condition that asks the player to gain and retain control of a number of specific forest clearings.

**Why it’s great:**Root offers a unique ecosystem of conflicting and contrasting goals, powers, and win conditions. That makes it different from similar war games like Risk or Small World, which are more straightforward to learn and play but provide fewer opportunities for alliances of convenience and surprising play. Because its factions’ abilities and goals are so distinct, playing and teaching a game of Root can feel a bit like playing and teaching four separate games.

But the game design’s genius is in what happens when you throw these disparate factions together on the cramped game board. Due to the opaqueness of the other factions’ motivations, you spend less time trying to stymie the other players and more time focused on how you can expand your domain and gain points—leading to consistently surprising interactions and interesting clashes over the course of a game.

This deep strategy is expertly paired with gorgeous, playful art that reinforces the fiction of the war-torn world, which feels like a gritty remake of the Redwall books. And all of this comes in a well-organized box that is surprisingly compact, considering the complexity of the game.

Root’s adorable art belies the game’s intense strategic gameplay experience. Connie Park/NYT Wirecutter

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Even compared with the other games we tested for this guide, Root is an intimidating game for newbies. In an unusual (but certainly not unwelcome) move, the creators tried to ease the barrier to entry by providing three sets of instructions, each with a different level of granularity and hand-holding. They range from a traditional rulebook (which reads like a law text) to a scripted, two-round, turn-by-turn walkthrough, with explanations for why factions would take certain actions as they happen.

Regardless of which instructions you follow, the first game is usually a dry run as players learn the basics. But because of the game’s relatively short run time (we found the published playtime of 60 to 90 minutes to be accurate), the prospect of a learning round followed by a competitive game is a bit more bearable.

Some of the factions are more strategically punishing than others, and this may lead to frustration for first-time players who choose their squad blindly. For example, the Eyrie Dynasty’s unwieldy decree system can be thrilling when it’s played effectively. But if you can’t fulfill its demands by the end of your turn (causing your government to “go into turmoil”), you lose points, and you effectively have your hands tied behind your back as you try to rebuild your government. If this happens multiple times in quick succession, it becomes much more difficult to claw your way back into the game, and that can be disheartening.

**Players:**two to four Duration: 60 to 90 minutes Rules: website (PDF), how to play (video) Digital version: multiplatform

An economic masterpiece: Brass: Birmingham

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Top pick

How it’s played: In Brass: Birmingham, players take on the role of British capitalists during the Industrial Revolution. The game covers a 100-year span, divided into the Canal Era and the Rail Era, indicating which form of freight travel was more prominent at the time (did I mention this game was about economics?). Over this time, players establish supply networks and build factories. Some of these produce consumable resources, like coal, iron, and beer, while others pump out items the player can sell, such as textiles, manufactured goods, and pottery. Either way, making and getting rid of these items is what gets you points.

Why it’s great: An economic puzzle that will take over your mind and have you thinking about building canal networks in your sleep, Brass is a goldmine for folks who love to obsess over finding efficiencies and advantages over other players.

There are so many things to keep track of in a game of Brass—resources to be gathered, networks to build, and goods to be sold. But all of these interlocking resources are created and fought over by the players at the table. If you want to build a pottery factory, you’re gonna need iron. If you want to produce iron, you’re gonna need coal. If you want to eventually sell that pottery, you’ll need beer. And to get any of that, you’re gonna need a network to move it all around.

What really makes Brass stand out is that you don’t necessarily need to produce all of that stuff by yourself. If another player has an iron foundry, you can use some of the iron they’ve produced. But the more iron—or beer or coal—you take from others, the more points they rack up for themselves.

This dance of producing and consuming and networking is the core mechanic that drives Brass—and, you know, capitalism—like the pistons of a coal-fired freight engine. And trying to figure out how to navigate this dense thicket of incentives better than the other players is what makes it so satisfying to puzzle out.

Despite its dry theme, Brass: Birmingham shines, thanks to its high-quality, evocative artwork and design. Connie Park/NYT Wirecutter

The game is also just a beautifully produced object. The art is evocative and moody, the box is slim, and the player boards convey a surprising amount of information quickly and effectively—once you learn how to read them.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

A full game of Brass tends to be on the long side, especially if one (or more) of the players suffers from analysis paralysis (a common side effect of the tangled web of possible actions available on each turn, and how much each action can matter to your long-term strategy). There are instructions for an “introductory version” of the game, which adjusts the scoring and takes players only through the first-round Canal Era. But the game loses some of its depth when you’re playing that version.

**Players:**two to four Duration: 60 to 120 minutes Rules: website (PDF), how to play (video) Digital version: Steam

A tabletop zoo simulator: Ark Nova

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Top pick

How it’s played: A colorful mix of Tetris and Zoo Tycoon, Ark Nova is a game about building a great zoo. To do that, players build enclosures, and they fill them with animals who will attract the most attention and make their park the most money.

But to win Ark Nova, players must also make sure their zoo has a positive impact on the environment, by networking with other zoos, gathering sponsorships, and participating in conservation projects. Players do all of these things by using a constantly shuffling queue of action cards, which become more powerful the longer you wait to use them.

Why it’s great: Sometimes with strategy games, the point is sprawl and scale. Sometimes you want to play a game that comes in a giant box—with hundreds of pieces—and a table presence that could overwhelm even the grandest of dining-room surfaces. In that sense, Ark Nova delivers.

There are multiple player boards to choose from, with different zoo layouts that each come with their own advantages and disadvantages. There are three different point tracks on which to advance (two of them travel in different directions and bestow victory points based on the delta between them at the end of the game). And there’s a stack of 255 unique cards towering over the shared boards (there are two), like an animal-filled Empire State Building.

This game is, to put it simply, a lot. But the way the game guides players through all of this—via its action-card queue system—is remarkably elegant.

Five actions are available to players at all times, but here’s the wrinkle: These actions are represented by cards arranged underneath each player board, and their effectiveness depends on where in the queue they are when you play them.

For example, when the Cards action is at the left end of the queue (at level one), it allows a player to draw one card and discard another; at the far right (level five), it lets you draw three and discard one. Whenever you play a card, regardless of its current level, it goes back to the leftmost side of the queue, making the rest of the cards more powerful.

Ark Nova takes up a lot of space on the table, but it uses that space well. Connie Park/NYT Wirecutter

Waiting for the card you want to play to power up can feel limiting, but in a game this sprawling, limitation is really a gift. It helps you focus on building a strategy based on where cards are in the queue, without being overwhelmed by the scale of the broader game going on. And though there is certainly a lot to chew on in Ark Nova, the turns are fast-paced, so you rarely have to wait too long before it’s time to make another move. The game also has a surprisingly engaging solo mode, which has been tense and exciting every time I’ve broken it out for testing.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

This game takes a long time to play. Even a solo playthrough took around 90 minutes, and with four people the game can easily go over two hours. But in our testing, the turns clicked by at a satisfying pace. It’s also an intimidating game in terms of setup and complexity, so introducing it to new players can be a bit overwhelming at first. Finally, from a moral perspective, some folks may have issues with the semi-realistic theme, since the impact of zoos on animals isn’t unequivocally positive.

**Players:**one to four Duration: 90 to 150 minutes Rules: website (PDF), how to play (video) Digital version: N/A

A whirlwind tour of strategy gaming’s greatest hits: Lost Ruins of Arnak

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Top pick

How it’s played: In Lost Ruins of Arnak, players take on the role of expedition leaders trying to learn more about the civilization that used to populate the mysterious island of Arnak. Players build decks that let them take actions, such as exploring ruins, overcoming wondrous ancient guardians, obtaining items, and researching the secrets of the island; all of these earn different amounts of victory points.

The turns are snappy, with each player getting to take one Main Action (one of the activities mentioned above) and any number of Free Actions (usually spending resources to get other resources). This continues until all players have passed, which ends the round. After five rounds, the player with the most victory points wins.

Why it’s great: Arnak is probably the easiest game to jump into of all our picks, and it’s fascinating because it melds a wide array of common game mechanics—such as deck building, set collection, worker placement, and exploration—into a cohesive whole. Its various actions and mechanics are a smorgasbord of modern game design’s greatest hits, giving players a small sample of each, without overburdening them with too much detail. And because your choice of actions per turn is so limited and your deck is small, you’re able to quickly prioritize your moves based on what resources are available to you that turn.

The game proceeds at a well-modulated pace: The first few rounds pass quickly, as players scrape together what they can with their low-powered decks and limited resources. But they build to a final round that—at least in our playthroughs—lasted almost as long as all of the other rounds combined. In this deciding round, players are able to use the items and powers they’ve accumulated over the course of the game to draw extra cards, gain more bonuses, and attempt more strategies before running out of options. This is true no matter how many people are playing, with the solo variant being particularly challenging and exciting.

Lost Ruins of Arnak offers a grab bag of game mechanics and interesting decisions in an easy-to-learn package. Connie Park/NYT Wirecutter

Flaws but not dealbreakers

This is the simplest of our picks for a newer gamer to get into, but by extension it isn’t as strategically deep as the other games in this guide. There’s still plenty to chew on, though, so even experienced tabletop gamers will enjoy playing alongside novices. And while the designers seem to have tried to keep this game out of culturally insensitive territory, it still traffics in many of the tropes of the pulp adventure/explorer genre, which some may want to avoid. Finally, the huge box lacks any internal organization, save for a small number of plastic bags. This makes packing and unpacking the game more of a chore than it really should be.

Lost Ruins of Arnak’s in-box organization leaves a lot to be desired. Connie Park/NYT Wirecutter

**Players:**one to four Duration: 60 to 120 minutes Rules: website (PDF), how to play (video) Digital version: Board Game Arena

An economic engine of tabletop tipples: Distilled

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Top pick

How it’s played: In Distilled, players take on the role of a rookie spirits maker taking over a startup distillery. During the game—which takes place over seven rounds—players buy ingredients, recipes, and equipment; distill liquors; improve their distillery through upgrades; and age spirits in their barrel warehouse.

To start each round, players take turns purchasing from the shared market. Next, they put any ingredients they’ve purchased—yeast, water, sugars (fruit, grain, and vegetable)—into a deck to shuffle. Finally, they remove the top and bottom cards from the deck (representing the heads and tails of the distilling process), and what’s left is their spirit for that round.

Once their spirit is complete, they can choose from appropriate spirit labels. Then they can opt either to sell their product right away—gaining victory points and money to use in the next round—or to age it in their barrel warehouse, letting the spirit pick up valuable flavors and even more victory points. After seven rounds, the player with the most victory points wins.

Distilled takes up a lot of table space, but the multiple boards mean you can arrange it in whatever configuration works best for your play area. Marki Williams/NYT Wirecutter

Why it’s great: In my experience, the struggle with strategy games is finding one that balances satisfying complexity with being easy to learn, run, and remember. Distilled comes closer than most to totally nailing that balance.

I’ve taught this game to about 15 people, and I’ve found that in about three rounds, they go from confused and overwhelmed to cautiously exploratory to confidently planning. Distilled’s mechanics and rules reinforce themselves during play in a way that feels intuitive, and its deep theming makes each action feel natural. This allows players to immerse themselves in the game, making instinctive choices without having to think too hard about rules.

That doesn’t mean the game is simple. Its mechanics stack in a way that provides plenty of latitude for decision-making, and players constantly need to juggle the competing demands of short- and long-term planning.

The box is also incredibly well organized, so this game is a breeze to set up and break down, even compared with setup and breakdown of much simpler games. The instructions go so far as to tell players to save the punchboards that ship with the game; they can be placed under the organizers, to help keep everything flush in the box.

The organizers that come in the box make setup and breakdown simpler than usual for a game of this size. Marki Williams/NYT Wirecutter

Flaws but not dealbreakers

This game revolves around producing alcohol, so it won’t be a great choice for players who are opposed to or have had problems with alcohol consumption. It’s also on the larger side, so folks with limited table or shelf space may not have room to set it up or store it properly.

**Players:**one to five Duration: 90 to 120 minutes Rules: website (PDF), how to play (video) Digital version: N/A

A trick-taking space opera: Arcs

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Top pick

How it’s played: Arcs powers its sprawling space-opera story with a trick-taking core. It takes place over a series of rounds, called chapters, during which you play cards from your hand to take actions on the board. The cards have one of four different suits (each with a different set of associated actions), a numerical value, and a number of pips—usually the higher the card value, the fewer pips it has.

If you’re leading the trick, you can play whatever suit you like and take as many actions as there are pips on the card. For instance, if you play a four of the Construction suit, which has three pips, you can take three actions associated with Construction—things such as building new ships and bases or repairing existing ones.

The players who follow you can then choose to either play a higher-value card of the same suit (again taking as many actions as there are pips on their card), copy your lead card (playing any card from their hand face down and taking one action of the lead card’s suit), or pivot by playing a card of any suit from their hand and taking only one of its associated actions, regardless of how many pips are on the card. After each player has played a card, whoever played the highest-value card of the lead suit takes the initiative marker and leads the next hand.

In addition to leading the trick, the player with initiative also has the option to declare an ambition, which determines what will score points for all players at the end of the chapter. That ambition can be anything from collecting the most of a certain material to destroying the most enemy ships to capturing opposing players’ tokens. The game continues until five chapters have been played, or one player reaches a set point total.

Why it’s great: Arcs’s theming is expansive—players pilot galactic civilizations through layers of conflict, construction, and palace intrigue—but the trick-taking format keeps gameplay on a narrow, tense path. Instead of getting lost in role playing, players are forced to carefully adjust their ambitions every time they get a new hand of cards.

Because your options are so limited when you’re not leading a trick, every decision is important. In concert with your ever-shifting goals from chapter to chapter, this makes it hard to plan far in advance. Instead, the game rewards flexibility and clever card-play.

Trying to navigate your way through a rough hand is one of the joys of Arcs. James Austin/NYT Wirecutter

A big part of being good at traditional trick-taking card games is how you maneuver your way around a badly dealt hand. Arcs builds on that tension with layers of decisions concerning things like ship-to-ship combat, palace intrigue, and area control. You’ll never get a hand that lets you accomplish even half of the things you’d want to do in a given chapter, so you have to assess your abilities and pivot in a way that most efficiently moves you toward your end goal.

Flaws but not dealbreakers This is a cutthroat game. Since players compete for limited resources, space, and points, with heavy limitations on their actions, they have a strong incentive to pillage one another’s holdings. The intense competition could put off folks who are used to low-stakes games like Wingspan or Arnak, but most of our testers didn’t mind.

Other strategy games worth considering

If you like your economic games with a side of auctioneering: Power Grid (now being sold as the Recharged edition) is a classic. This engine-building economic game has you play as a utility company trying to power the most cities in either Germany or the USA.

Players have to balance buying power plants, paying for fuel, and expanding their network across the board, all while competing with the other players over these shared resources. This interconnected system makes the auction portion of the game sizzle, as each player tries to assess how valuable any particular power plant is to each player, and how they can make them spend more money than they otherwise would have.

With this mix of contentious auction jockeying peppered in between bouts of intense strategic management, Power Grid ends up providing a ton of excitement and tense moments—more than you might expect from a game where a phase in each turn is called “Bureaucracy.”

If you’re looking for a deep strategy game that you can explain in five minutes: Give Small World a shot. It’s essentially a sped-up version of Risk, populated with fantasy species instead of world powers. It’s an area-control game, with 14 different factions competing to dominate a space that’s way too small for all of them.

Each faction comes with its own unique power, but it’s also randomly paired with an ability that gives it an additional perk (for instance, one power provides extra points for controlling forest sections, another piles on extra money, and one even comes with a dragon). This keeps the game fresh for each playthrough. Small World is also quick and easy to explain while still remaining strategically satisfying.

If you want something that’s completely different: Cryptid is a game of strategic guesswork. The players are cast as cryptozoologists, competing to see who can be the first to discover proof of a cryptid (essentially a mythological creature, like Sasquatch) in the North American wilderness.

At the beginning of the game, each player gets one piece of information about the cyptid’s habitat (like “the habitat is within one space of a mountain tile” or “the habitat is within two spaces of a bear territory”). Over the course of the game, they try to suss out what the additional clues are by asking other players to confirm or deny that it’s possible, based on their clue, that a given space could contain the cryptid.

It’s a bit like Minesweeper, which sounds dry but is tense and exciting in practice, as each question reveals a little more information.

If Arnak sounds fun, but you prefer a sci-fi theme: Dune: Imperium Uprising is mechanically similar—with a mix of worker placement and deck building—but encourages more direct confrontation between the players. And, of course, it’s themed around Frank Herbert’s legendary Dune universe.

Gameplay focuses on gathering resources by sending workers to various points on the desert planet Arrakis, “persuading” advisor cards to join your deck, and sending warriors (or sometimes huge sand worms) to battle other players for points and resources.

The combat mechanism and unique leader cards give this game a bit more flavor and asymmetry than in Arnak. While we think Arnak is a better fit for a wider range of players, if you want a bit more to chew on or just prefer the sci-fi theme, this is a good option.

If you’re a Wingspan fan but want a bit more complexity: Wyrmspan looks like a simple re-skin, but don’t be fooled—it adds a few new layers to the engine-building game that make it a more intense mental workout.

Like its aviary counterpart, Wyrmspan focuses on collecting creatures in an individual tableau that grants you resources. You can then use those resources to attract more creatures and more points.

Wyrmspan adds a layer of exploration to the standard Wingspan game loop, requiring players to acquire and play cavern tiles before they can attract their winged wyrms. It also has a guild system that grants additional resources and replaces the stack of bird cards with a collection of whimsical draconic creatures that range from adorable to intimidating.

What to look forward to

We’re testing a new crop of games this year, including:

• Gaia Project, in which players take control of a galaxy-spanning civilization and attempt to outplay their opponents by expanding and better utilizing their planetary reach
• Nemesis, a semi-cooperative game set in the world of the Alien franchise
• Great Western Trail, a classic management game themed around getting cattle trains through the frontier of the American West
• Darwin’s Journey, a worker-placement game tracking the titular scientist’s journey through the Galápagos Islands

The competition

Cascadia was very popular in our testing, and many testers who describe themselves as casual players enjoyed its straightforward-but-fun tile-laying puzzle. It was also named the best strategy game of 2022 by the American Tabletop Awards, and it won the prestigious 2022 Spiel des Jahres. But compared with our picks, it didn’t provide the strategic depth or complexity that we were looking for.

Furnace is a quick and fun economic engine-building game, with a counterintuitive, albeit interesting, auction system at its center. It’s quick to learn and satisfying to play, but we think Power Grid offers a more complete experience.

Kanban EV is an economic worker placement game that tasks players for eeking out every scrap of efficiency they can as they manage the production of new electric vehicles. It’s an intricate and engaging puzzle, with enough player options and actions to make even the most confident game player suffer from analysis paralysis. It’s a worthy challenge for experienced gamers, but in our playtest it wasn’t as satisfying as our picks, and the eye-watering price (usually around $120) doesn’t help.

Kutná Hora: The City of Silver is a complex economic game that casts players as wealthy families in the rapidly growing city of Kutná Hora. You play two-sided cards from your hand, choosing one of their two actions in an attempt to explore mines, negotiate with guilds, build out the city, and finish building a cathedral. Throughout the game, the value and cost of the materials you need shifts based on the actions taken, replicating an ever-shifting commodity market. It’s a clever system, and it leads to interesting outcomes. But ultimately we found the way Brass: Birmingham forces you to both rely on and compete with your rivals to be more complex and satisfying.

Living Forest won the 2022 Kennerspiel des Jahres (the world’s premier award for more-complex games), and it was fun when we played it on the online game engine Board Game Arena. Unfortunately, it sold out everywhere shortly after the award was announced. We hope it will come back in stock soon, and then we can get our hands on a copy, to test it properly.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has a commanding table presence. It’s colorful, expansive, and has a giant spinning solar system at its center. The game tasks players with sending probes, scanning the stars, and otherwise doing science-y things to try and make contact with alien intelligence. And when it happens in the game, it can reveal one of two random new alien species that will give more opportunities for points and introduce new game mechanics midway through a playthrough. It’s a neat concept, and provides some variability and replayability to an otherwise pretty straightforward game. But it also made the first half of a play-through feel a bit bland, and the game tended to run quite long especially with four players. For those reasons, we prefer our picks.

Scythe is complex and evocative, with wonderful layers of strategy and tactical decisions wrapped up in a steampunk theme that’s a joy to immerse yourself in. But, specifically in terms of its being a strategy game, we think that Root takes better advantage of similar asymmetric strategy ideas, that Brass: Birmingham has more-involved and satisfying economic choices, and that Arnak presents a fresher mix of mechanics and theme. Scythe is still a wonderful experience, but we think our picks are better examples of modern strategy-game design.

Terraforming Mars is one of the better-known games we tested. Its card play is similar to that of Ark Nova (and it comes with an even larger deck), and its engine-building feedback loop is very satisfying. But we found Ark Nova to be more enjoyable in our testing.

The White Castle is a worker and dice placement game set in 1700s Japan and is about players trying to earn renown for their clan by doing work around the titular white castle. Players select dice from a common pool and place them in various locations to take associated actions, often to collect resources to power more valuable actions later. It’s pretty straightforward and fairly easy to teach once you know what the actions and rewards are. But in our playthroughs we found that it wasn’t as engaging or entertaining as our picks.

Wingspan is also among our favorite games. But even though we love it, we don’t think it’s as strong of a strategy game as our picks. The engine-building game offers a wonderful, relaxing time, and it really took off (get it?) when it was released in 2019. Wingspan is a great introduction to the board-gaming hobby, but it lacks the depth of the similarly environmentally themed Ark Nova.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.