Strategy games

The shelf to come to when you want to think rather than react, and the one where both of our slowest games live.

Salt & Stone is a town on a bare rock island in an invented sea: quarries, farms, warehouses, and ships sent out for everything the island cannot grow. Nothing kills you. You lose by running the place badly through a winter. Reefhold is the short version of the same instinct — huts, fields and docks on a small island, every building scoring from what is next to it, three minutes a run.

The licensed half of the shelf is mostly board games — Master Chess Multiplayer, English Checkers, Turkish draughts, Dominoes classic duel — plus Real Estate Tycoon and Kingdom Tower Defense, which are the kind of thinking that happens on a spreadsheet rather than against an opponent. Terrifying Zombies: Tower Defense II is the loudest thing here and the one to start with if a board looks like homework.