Why strategy games finally feel good on phones

For years, playing strategy on a phone meant squinting and mis-tapping. The genre was built for a mouse, and no amount of porting fixed the fat-finger problem. Lately that's changed, and it's worth talking about why.

The shift came from designing for touch first instead of shrinking a PC interface. Drawing unit paths with a finger, tapping to group, pausing cleanly in menus — these aren't compromises, they're their own kind of control that works.

Tideborn Command is my favourite recent example, but it's part of a wider trend. Matches are shorter, maps are denser, and designers assume you might stop mid-game. That respect for context matters more than raw depth.

If you wrote off mobile strategy a few years back, it's genuinely worth another look.