Ironhold Dominion

Ironhold Dominion asks you to run a small realm and keep it alive across decades. You manage food, defence, trade routes and the moods of your advisors, and the game is happy to let you fail if you ignore any of them. It's a thinking player's strategy game, closer to a board game than a flashy conquest title.

The clever part is that turns are discrete — nothing happens in real time, nothing ticks while the app is closed. That makes it perfect for offline play, and it means you can take as long as you like weighing up whether to raise taxes or risk a famine. We kept one campaign going for days, picking it up whenever we had a spare minute.

It's not pretty in a modern sense — the interface is all maps and menus — but once the systems click together it's genuinely hard to put down.

What we liked

• Deep turn-based economy
• No real-time timers at all
• Great for long commutes