Best iPhone & iPad Apps & Games

Riot's auto-battler is a genuinely deep economic strategy game that lost nothing in the port to touch — but seven years in, its interface still treats...

Daniel Lutz has welded tile-laying board game logic onto tower defense and produced one of the most quietly clever strategy games on mobile — provided...

Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger took the most solved-out puzzle in human history and fixed everything around it, building a sudoku app that actually te...

A Sharp has built the rarest thing in strategy gaming — a systems-heavy clan simulator that you play for the *writing* — and then wrapped it in enough...

Athena Crisis is the most rigorous grid-tactics game released in years, and its Invasion mechanic is the first genuinely new idea the genre has had in...

Twenty-seven years on, King of Dragon Pass remains the high-water mark for narrative strategy — a clan-management sim where myth is a game mechanic an...

Michael Brough packed more strategic depth into a 6x6 grid than most studios manage in forty hours. Thirteen years after release, **868-HACK** remains...

Michael Brough's Portuguese-language mystery-box roguelike turns *not knowing what your tools do* into the entire game — and it's one of the smartest ...

The original Jackbox Party Pack solved a problem the industry had ignored for decades — getting non-gamers to play — with one brilliant stroke: a brow...

Terraforming Mars is one of the deepest engine-builders you can put on a screen, and this adaptation gets the rules right while getting the presentati...

Pomelo Games has quietly built one of the most approachable strategy games of the decade — a mission-based town builder where letting go of control is...

Fourteen years in, Clash of Clans remains the best-constructed compulsion loop on mobile — a genuinely strategic raiding game wrapped around a progres...

Twelve years after its seven-day birth, Hoplite remains the gold standard for turn-based tactics on a phone. Four dollars buys you a lifetime of two-m...

Consume Me is the rare autobiographical game that makes its subject *playable* rather than merely narrated — a caustic, funny, quietly devastating sim...

CloverPit takes Balatro's number-go-up alchemy, locks it in a rusting prison cell, and wires it to a horror story about debt and addiction. It's grimy...

Root is a superb digital adaptation of one of the decade's most demanding board games — patient, polished, and honest about its source material's brut...

Chess.com is the most complete chess product ever built for a phone — a sprawling, brilliant, occasionally exhausting ecosystem that will make you a b...

A staggeringly deep sandbox space RPG that rewards patience with hundreds of hours of emergent storytelling—if you can survive an onboarding process t...

Louis Rigaud's card-battler about fighting your own depression is one of the sharpest, most emotionally honest roguelikes of its generation — but the ...

Pocket City is a small game with a big spine—a genuinely respectful, paywall-free tribute to classic SimCity that fits in your pocket and refuses to r...

More than a decade on, Ironhide's fantasy tower defense still sets the standard—tight, funny, and ruthlessly well-designed. If you own a screen and a ...

A gleefully deranged marriage of physics toy and roguelike math-engine, *Nubby's Number Factory* turns bouncing a ball off pegs into one of the most c...

Monster Couch's digital port of Wingspan is a near-flawless translation of one of the decade's best board games — gorgeous, calming, and mechanically ...

Coromon isn't content to cosplay as a Game Boy Advance-era Pokémon clone—it interrogates the genre's oldest habits and fixes most of them. A stamina-d...