Tidelock Dominion

Tidelock Dominion is a strategy game about controlling an archipelago, and the clever part is that water is both your highway and your biggest problem. You can't just march armies everywhere; you need ships, ports and supply lines, and the AI is happy to cut yours if you leave them exposed.

Matches are turn-based and can be saved mid-session, which suits mobile. I played most of my games in ten-minute bursts across a week and never lost the thread. The economy is the heart of it: hoarding resources is useless if you can't move them, so you're constantly balancing expansion against logistics.

The interface took a couple of sessions to click, mostly because there's a lot of information packed into a phone screen. Once it did, I found it one of the more thoughtful strategy games on mobile.

What we liked

• Supply lines you actually have to defend
• Save-anywhere turn-based pacing
• Economy-first design over brute force