Frontline Tacticon

Frontline Tacticon strips strategy down to what matters: a grid, limited units, and decisions that hurt. You never have enough soldiers for everything, so every turn is a small gamble about where to fall back and where to hold. We lost our first three maps and enjoyed every failure.

Matches are bite-sized, which is rare for the genre on mobile. You can play a full skirmish in ten minutes without feeling rushed. The interface is clean and the tap targets are big enough that you rarely misclick a move — a small thing that too many strategy games get wrong.

The campaign has a nice difficulty spread, and there's a puzzle mode with hand-crafted scenarios that we ended up preferring to the main game.

What we liked

• Ten-minute strategy sessions
• Clean, phone-friendly interface
• Excellent hand-made puzzle scenarios