Looking back at it now, 2020 doesn’t feel like a banner year for strategy games, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few gems. The list below – gathered by a panel of experts and regularly updated – contains games from as recently as 12 months ago alongside classics from as far back as 28 years ago. They’re all games we think you could play and love right now.

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There it is, the trans-planetary pipeline. One long tube of metal scarring a rural alien planet. It brings coal and water to my power stations, and electricity to my factories. It has taken a day of planning, construction and pumping. Now, the pipeline stands before me, a snaking behemoth of energy consumption. Suddenly, a thought comes. Why didn’t I just build coal stations next to the vein? I could have stretched a cheap wire across the planet, instead of a kilometre-long death pipe.

This is Satisfactory, a cracking first-person factory-builder that’s been in early access on Epic for a while. It’s coming to Steam today, so RPS management dispatched me to inspect the game’s machinery and ruin the extraterrestrial idyll with smog and incompetence. They sent the right person.

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Board games don’t belong on computers. They’re a refuge from the screens that bore into our eyeballs and our lives, a chance to bask in the musky glow of fleshy humans. But sometimes those humans are far away, and sometimes stores give digitised board games away for free. The Epic Games Store is handing out the tile-laying town-planning sheep-appreciating Carcassonne, along with the railway-building Ticket To Ride. Ticket’s fine, but Carcassonne is way better.

Epic were originally going to give Pandemic away too, but issued a press release saying they’d scrapped those plans until “a later date”. Presumably someone rethought the optics of using a game about global infection to advertise their store during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

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For a time it looked as though strategy games had sunk into a kind of deathly malaise, unsure which territory to claim next and which ones it should leave well and truly alone. Fast forward to 2020, though, and strategy games have never looked healthier, which is why we’ve compiled this best strategy games list of all time. Whether you want to conquer the depths of space, wage historical warfare or hulk around in big mechanical robots, there’s a strategy game for you below.

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Did you hear? Board games are cool again. In fact, they re so cool that big hitters from the cardboard world are making their way over to the digital one on a more and more regular basis. To help you get your virtual collection of cardboard started, we ve gathered the 10 best board games available on PC today, all in one handy list. You ll find co-op hits, thinky strategy and everything in-between. The thing they all have in common is that they re worth your time and precious pennies, so there s no need to roll the dice, so to speak.

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You’ll ocassionally find someone on the internet sounding off about how the strategy genre is dead. If you see such a person in the future, send them this list of the best strategy games ever made.

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It is so likeZach to release a Zachlike (just a Zach to his friends) about creating drugs in a small Romanian apartment. Molek-Syntez is now squatting on early access, trying to hook you in with the good stuff as you program your molecular synthesiser. Your goal is to turn chemicals into medicines and other substances with “various pharmacological effects”.

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Zach-like, the book about Zachlikes by Zach Barth, creator of the genre, is now free albeit notably less papery now. Zachtronics’s previously Kickstarter-exclusive book was a collection of design documents from the creator of Spacechem, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory and many more, showing just how he engineers his puzzles. Now anyone can read a digital version for free, and it comes bundled with a pile of his early browser games, unreleased prototypes, and even a card game if you’ve got printer ink to burn. Grab it free on Steam. I feel smarter just having it on my PC.

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Sometimes, when a board game loves a personal computer very much, they create something new. Fanatical have got seven digified board games on sale, and there are some gooduns tucked between those I’m not familiar with. Small World 2 and Splendor are my highlights, though there’s also the likes of Pandemic, Carcassonne, Mysterium and Ticket To Ride.

Digital board games tend to be a poor substitute for playing against real world fleshsacks. But sometimes there are no fleshsacks within reach.

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I reckon most of the RPS Treehouse gang love us some Zachlikes, since well before Alice Prime coined the term in 2016 in reference to Shenzhen I/O. Puzzlemeister Zach Barth likes the term too, as he’s borrowed it for the title of his book. Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter (500% funded in one day), Zach-Like shows the workings and the processes behind his practical puzzlers. There’s design docs for his major games, sketches and documents for some that never got made and some early design exercises. There’s even some pen-and-paper brainteasers in there, because we’re gluttons for punishment.

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