Some time ago I wound up installing F-Droid, and on a whim one day tried browsing some of the games on it.

I found "Feudal Tactics", a recreation of a simple turn based strategy game I used to play in the 2000s and installed it asap, and I've been playing it pretty consistently ever since.

The original I knew as Slay, and admittedly it had some more quality of life features and fun stuff like stats, but the modern Android version is apparently fairly clunky. (I know at least a few of the author's games are just recreations of existing ones, though I am unaware of an alternate origin for Slay).

The game generates a shape map of hexagons, assigns tiles random colors for each player that owns them, and any group of two or more has a tile get a little village added to it. Each turn those villages get one gold per tile attached to spend on villagers that can then move to adjacent tiles to add them to your kingdom.

Villagers protect adjacent hexes from equally strong or weaker units. If you combine two villagers they increase in rank to become one spearman which can defeat villagers (and villages!) and take their tile. You can also spend money to build castles which protect their surroundings from the stronger spearmen units as well.

So of course a spearman and a villager can combine to become an even stronger baron, and lastly a baron and villager become a knight which cannot be defeated in combat.

The catch to all this is that each unit has an upkeep cost as well, with stronger units costing more than the sum of their components did, scaling pretty significantly.

As a kid I mostly enjoyed playing on easier difficulties where I could just kind of win by default. Now I'm really enjoying the hard difficulty where I feel like if you can get a game underway, you should be able to win, though admittedly sometimes it seems like you have no chance. The game makes maps instantly and lets you reroll freely before starting so you can try to find favorable layouts before committing.

The map generation has a few modifiers as well, which allows for tiny maps or some pretty huge ones where I've had games go for a good 2 hours. It's very addicting! Despite the simple mechanics, there's some fun nuance needed to do well. You can cut a kingdom in half and take out an entire army at once. Units able to destroy castles are really pricy, so there's very much a divider in how you do things before and after you/opponents get one. You can aim to expand towards chokepoints where a castle effectively bottles up a huge chunk of the map to fight amongst smaller kingdoms while you clean up the rest of the map first. Longer games have had me using the strongest units to make an impassable wall that carefully shifts to cut off portions of land for the rest of the army to take.

Victory doesn't require you to capture the entire island, just getting the CPU to concede once you have a significantly large portion of everything. At times though I've wished they gave up a little easier, as it's really beyond any reasonable doubt when they finally give up.

There's another mechanic with trees as well. They're spawned at the start on random tiles and while they count for your kingdom's borders, they don't count for generating income. Trees on the coast spawn as palm trees and each cluster of them will grow a new one in a random adjacent tile. Trees inland are pine trees that only spread if there's at least one more tree adjacent to them. If you aren't careful, you can wind up constantly playing weed-whacker with a tiny kingdom and be unable to actually grow, or even have your villagers die off if there's no gold to support them.

And when you do cut off an enemy and they die because of it, they turn into a gravestone which grows into a tree on the next turn. It's possible for a larger force to suddenly become a forest and make the trees a real issue even if the enemy takes the tile back next turn and re-combines the split kingdoms into one.

Though I do have some complaints with this mobile version that has some very tiny UI, tiny enough to be hard to press buttons on game config screen to change island size or reroll and such. Your kingdom's savings and profit/loss of gold next turn (currently) is white text with a black outline, but it's small enough that it can be hard to read over certain color tiles so there's a lot of extra scrolling just to read it. I also wouldn't mind if it let you either rotate the camera in game or just rotate the island before starting as scrolling horizontally can mean a lot of tiny swipes compared to scrolling vertically.

Anyway it's really fun and I wanted to write about something I've been liking for a bit!