I’m now the very proud developer and owner of Strategery, the classic iOS game. I just released a brand new version of the app, available now in the App Store. You should absolutely check it out. But I’d love to tell you the backstory.
Playing the game
In 2009, I found Strategery in the App Store. I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled across it, but I know that I spent a lot of time exploring the App Store in those days, because it still felt like you could kind of see everything if you spent enough time. There were many apps, but still, you could sort of count them.
I recognized Strategery as a sort-of Risk-like game — though I’d never actually played Risk. I thought the name was funny (pulled from Will Ferrell as George W. Bush on Saturday Night Live). And the gameplay was straightforward, fun as heck, and rather addictive: Attack colorful amorphous regions, subject to the whim of dice roll coupled with your gameplay strategy, win or lose, play again.
I reviewed the game for Macworld. In April 2009. That’s 17 years ago.
On your turn, you tap any country you control that has at least two armies, and then tap an adjacent nation you wish to attack. Each army involved counts as one die, and if the sum of all the dice your armies roll is greater than the sum of your enemies — well, get ready to plunder. You’ll immediately take ownership of their land … but if the final dice score was close, expect to lose some armies in the process.
That review got Fireballed. Strategery got hugely popular.
In 2009, Macworld named the app Best Strategy Game. In my writeup for that award, I said, “There is no game I play on my iPhone more than Strategery” — a quote that ended up on the game’s App Store page, which I found exquisitely exciting. I also wrote:
Simple on the surface, Strategery offers depth that can — and will — claim hours of your time.
How the game began
Original developers Sumul Shah and Courtland Idstrom met in college in 1999. Their first app was Top Shelf (née iDrink), which was a cocktail reference tool that hit Apple’s Top 100 chart. With their friend Peter Ju freelancing for them, they built and launched Strategery in 2009.
The game offered local multiplayer at the start, and eventually added online multiplayer too. At one point, there was a standalone Lite version — the App Store was a different beast in those days.
The last Strategery update in the App Store was version 3.8, released June 2017. It had been a two year gap since its prior update, which came two years after that prior update.
Strategery was a hit, but its co-creators eventually moved on. Shah ran a design studio with his wife for nearly a decade, and later founded (and led design for) a medical technology company. Idstrom went to work at Apple back in 2018 and has been there since.
But the darn thing kept working. It’s been working with no further updates since 2017. That’s bonkers.
99 percent inspiration
In August of this year, Jim Ray posted on Mastodon:
I had noted the same thing — that Strategery had stopped working on iOS 27 betas. It made me sad.
As Jim noted, wow was the app a great investment back in the day; you paid a buck or three (depending on when you got it), and got as many as seventeen years of enjoyment out of it. That’s crazy.
But I was still sad to let it go. Strategery is a great game, a great time-passer when lines are long or planes are delayed.
I decided I’d try to build my own version.
I got my app — which I first called “Averse,” as in “Risk Averse,” and later called “Skirmish,” when friends told me “Skirmishish” was terrible — to a pretty good place. But I immediately concluded I wasn’t comfortable sharing the app with anyone but a few friends on TestFlight.
(Legally, you can’t copyright game mechanics. So I could have released the app under a different name as my own thing. It’s why so many knockoff games exist. But my concern wasn’t a legal one.)
I loved Strategery. I didn’t feel good about knocking it off. So I reached out to the developers.
Or I tried to. The old email addresses I had from some correspondence in 2010 didn’t work anymore. I did some Internet stalking and found the developers. And then when I found a web game Shah had made — Figure — it had an email address. I made contact.
I had several delightful video conversations with Sumul and Courtland. And I lucked out: I found two of the nicest developers you could ever hope to meet. They still felt a ton of love for Strategery, they loved how many people still felt warmly about the game — but they didn’t have time to devote to keeping it updated. We worked out a deal for me to take it on.
With great power comes great responsibility
I’m lucky. In addition to taking over the app, I also get a direct line to insights from Courtland and Sumul. They pointed out features I’d missed in my recreation, explained why some things worked the way they did, and suggested and talked through various feature ideas. The new Strategery is the same game but also clearly a different game.
And I’m inspired by Jim’s Mastodon post — and the two co-creators. We all agreed that the nicest thing to do was update the app in place, so folks who already owned it, still owned it. If you bought it eons ago for $2, you get the new version today. (If you’re overcome with the need to spend money on Strategery anew, I did add a tip jar.)
The new version of the game should be recognizably Strategery to anyone who remembers the original version. But I also aimed to add some Lexisms.
There’s some whimsy throughout, in the algorithmically-generated country names, the snarky play by play, and the overall language used by the game. And I added Chaos Mode, where taking over certain regions triggers a roulette wheel that causes mostly good things to happen (extra pegs, a new region), and sometimes instead, you know, takeths away.
Newcomers can buy the app outright for $5. (Inflation is the worst. Sorry.) But existing owners get Strategery 4.0 for free. May the blobs be ever in your favor.