Entertainment

4 brain bending strategy games on Android

Work out your gray matter with these brain busters.

Mobile games have a reputation for being simple, repetitive cash grabs, but there’s a wide selection of surprisingly robust strategy games on Android. Here’s a few to bookmark on an app like Samsung Game Launcher for the next time you’re looking for looking for a new challenge to conquer.

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Mindustry

Combine open-world building with tower defense and a hefty dose of real-time strategy and player versus player and you get the one-of-a-kind gaming experience of Mindustry. As the opening tutorial leads you down, ever deeper into its complex yet practical mechanics, you’ll gain a growing appreciation for the thought and craft for which Mindustry was made.

In the simplest of terms, Mindustry is a game of building and protecting a massive mining operation. And also obliterating your opponents. You play as a builder-drone, tasked with starting a mining operation on a mostly-empty open-world map. Though you start with a small repertoire of building abilities, the game soon equips your ship with the ability to build numerous structures, mining depots, turbines, conveyors, turrets and more, giving you everything you need to build your mining empire. Seems easy enough, but Mindustry is deceptively simple.

You also need to power your structures, organize your resources and, of course, keep everything protected from attacking drones.

Once you’ve learned the ropes and have a few levels under your belt, the game offers a map editor and PVP battles for more experienced players to stage epic battles. You can host a game or join others from a connected server. Game types are completely customizable, so there’s virtually endless ways to play.

Mindustry can be unforgiving at first, but with a little patience, extremely rewarding as you build elaborate conveyors and engineer a world-class mining operation to take over the world. With its combination of open-world RTS with tower defense and PVP, Mindustry has something that everyone can get excited about.

Civilization VI

If you need an introduction to one of the most well-known game series in the history of gaming, this is the series that put the city-building genre on the map. Civilization VI takes everything that makes its predecessors great and makes it even better: better graphics, more intuitive controls, more skill trees and more unit types. Study knowledge to grow your strength, make friends with neighboring civilizations, and then crush them in epic battles.

Northgard

Northgard puts you in control of a Viking clan exploring a new, undiscovered territory and fighting for control against unknown enemies, harsh landscapes and frigid winters. Based on Norse mythology, Northgard blends RTS with role-playing mechanics for a gaming experience that will keep you invested and on your toes for what’s next.

If you’re used to RTS games, you’ll feel right at home with the building, resource management and defense mechanics of Northgard. As with those games, the more resources you gather, the more you can build. And the more you build, the more unit types you unlock. But the game mixes it up with a “happiness” meter, that you have to manage as well. The less happy your village is, the less villagers will want to join you, which can have drastic effects on your production.

As you expand your village, you’ll run into enemies like wolves and other towns, so be prepared for epic battles. In typical Viking fashion, Northgard is won by destroying other towns, or controlling a certain amount of territory. Northgard is a terrific entry into the RTS gaming genre and looks stunning on your Samsung device.

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Card Thief

If you’re looking for a digital card game that raises the stakes and is unlike anything else out there, Card Thief changes the game completely. Conceptually, Card Thief takes a second to wrap your head around because it’s so unique – but once you grasp the game mechanics, it’s an absolute blast to play.

Unlike traditional card-based games where cards augment the action in some way, in Card Thief, then cards are the playing field. You play as a thief tasked with navigating your way through a 3X3 grid of cards, evading guards, grabbing treasure, and making a deft escape without getting caught or using all of your stealth points. Each level is a puzzle game that requires a little planning and strategy, and a whole lot of fun. The choices you make on one turn, can completely change what happens the next one, so if you’re looking for a game with maximum replay value, Card Thief has it in spades.

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