Best Strategy Games for Ubuntu 26.04, 24.04 & 22.04 LTS

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A classic base building strategy game about two sides fighting over a resource that grows back where the wars were.

This is the game people have been waiting for since Command & Conquer stopped. You collect resources, build a base, then push out with a mixed force, and it all moves at the fast pace of the old games rather than the slower modern ones. The campaign is properly made, with briefings and a story that takes itself just seriously enough. The two sides play differently enough that switching feels like learning half a new game.

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Historical strategy across four ages, with eight civilisations that each break the rules in their own way.

The easiest modern strategy game to learn. You can tell what a unit is at a glance, the tech tree is short enough to remember, and the tutorials teach you real skills instead of just naming buttons. Each civilisation plays its own way, so the Mongols packing up their whole town and moving it is not a small touch, it changes how you play. If you have never tried one of these and want to know what the fuss is about, start here.

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Second World War fighting where you hold ground with a few squads instead of building a big army.

Cover decides everything. A squad behind a low wall beats the same squad out in the open, so every fight comes down to who reaches the good ground first and who can get around the side without being cut down crossing the road. There is no base to spam units from, so losing four men hurts and you play carefully because of it. The Italian campaign puts a turn based map on top, which lets you choose your fights instead of taking them in a set order.

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A turn based map on top of real time battles with thousands of soldiers on screen at once.

The size of it is the reason to play. You spend ten minutes moving armies and running a province, then drop into a battle where your infantry hold a hill while something enormous with wings comes over the top of them. Immortal Empires joins all three games into one huge map, so a single campaign can last months if you let it. It runs natively, and it is one of the few games here where an older machine will really feel the strain in the big fights. If the battles appeal more than the map, our action games list is the next place to look.

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The 1999 strategy game, rebuilt for modern screens and still getting new civilisations every year.

It is here because people still play it every night, not out of respect for its age. The economy is simple enough to learn and deep enough to keep catching you out, and just getting good at managing villagers takes months on its own. Ranked matches are busy, the campaigns still hold up, and new civilisations arrive regularly. If a friend has ever said they play Age of Empires, this is almost certainly the one they mean.

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A free strategy game about big robot armies, with smart controls that handle the boring parts for you.

Your units are clever enough to keep their distance, back off when hurt and hold a line without you clicking every one of them. That leaves you free to think about the actual plan. There are hundreds of unit types, a long single player campaign, and none of it costs anything. It is not the prettiest game on this list, but very few give you this much to play with for free.

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A free strategy game about ancient warfare, with thirteen civilisations from Rome to Han China.

It looks and plays like a full price game and it is made by volunteers. You gather food, stone and metal, build a town, raise an army and go and take somebody else’s. In February 2026 it reached Release 28 and finally dropped the alpha label, which is a fair sign of how solid it now is. It is in Ubuntu’s own software list, so it is one command away and there is nothing to sign up for.

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Turn based squad fighting with a campaign that remembers what you did, on ground you can blow holes in.

The fights feel slower and heavier than most games like this because your squads have real weight to them. You call in support, you pin a position down before you move on it, and a careless approach loses a whole squad instead of one soldier. Between missions you run a ship, your officers and a campaign map that shifts depending on what you left standing. It is the newest game in this section and it does not feel copied from anything.

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Turn based fighting where your soldiers get stronger the further you push, and pushing is also how you die.

The whole game runs on one clever idea. Exploring builds up points that pay for your best abilities, but the tomb you are in wakes up more the longer you stay. Every mission becomes a bet on whether one more room is worth it. By the end your squad is ridiculous, walking artillery with more upgrades than limbs, and the soundtrack is one of the best in any game like this.

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Explore a map with heroes, gather an army, then fight it out on a small hex battlefield.

This is the old Heroes of Might and Magic shape, done properly by people who clearly loved it. You wander, pick up resources, grow a town, and then two armies meet and the game becomes a tight little puzzle with your spellcasters working from behind the line. The pixel art is lovely without being cute, and the four sides play far more differently than the art suggests.

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A small turn based game on an eight by eight grid, where you can see exactly what the enemy will do next.

There is no luck in it. The game shows you every enemy move before you commit, so a lost building is always your own mistake, and that makes it one of the most satisfying puzzles in games. A full run takes about an hour, the whole thing is a few hundred megabytes, and it will run on any laptop you own. If you have twenty minutes and a train journey, this is the one.

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Build a civilisation from one settler to a space programme, across three separate historical ages.

The big change is that your civilisation changes as the ages turn instead of staying the same people for six thousand years. That fixes the old problem where the last third of a game was already decided. Cities now spread outward in a way that makes the land matter more, and each new age gives you a clean chance to catch up or pull ahead. It is still the game you start after dinner and finish at three in the morning.

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The previous Civilization, with districts, a mountain of expansions and a very large player base.

Plenty of people still prefer this one and they are not just being stubborn. Districts make you plan a city around the land instead of stacking everything on one tile, the two big expansions are fully sorted after years of patches, and there are more mods than you could get through. It also goes on sale constantly, which makes it the cheapest way into this kind of game by a wide margin.

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Four hundred years of history on a map of the whole world, played through trade, deals and slow growth.

This is the one where you go and look up what really happened afterwards. Every province has people in it with their own culture and religion, and shifting those numbers is often more useful than winning a war. It is hard to learn and honest about that, but the tutorial is far better than this series used to have. Give it one full run as a middling European country before you decide.

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A strategy game about a family rather than a country, played across generations of heirs.

It is the funniest game on this list and it never tries to be. You are not playing France, you are playing one particular person with a temper and a bad marriage, and when they die you play their son, who has inherited both. The wars are usually less interesting than surviving what happens to the family afterwards. Nothing else produces stories like it.

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The Second World War at the level of divisions, supply lines and factory output.

It is the hardest thing Paradox makes, because the front line does not care about your plan if your trucks cannot get there. Working out how to build a division that actually holds is an evening on its own. What you get back is a war that behaves like a real one, where something you set up three months ago suddenly opens up and the whole map moves at once.

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A space game where you design your own species, then go and find out what else is out there.

The first two hours of a Stellaris game are the best two hours in the genre. You are exploring, every system has something in it, and what you find is properly written science fiction rather than filler. It settles into a more familiar empire game later on, but that opening never gets old, and ten years of expansions mean there are more ways to play than you will ever get through.

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Grow two Roman provinces at once, each wanting different things, and keep the trade running between them.

Anno has always been about supply chains dressed up as a beautiful city, and this is the best looking one yet. The catch is that your two provinces want different goods, so you cannot copy one onto the other, and the moment a route goes wrong the whole thing backs up behind it. Zoom in and you can watch individual carts making the journey. It is the most demanding game here on your hardware.

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A medieval village builder where the layout follows the land instead of a grid, with battles when they come.

Most builders let you draw a road anywhere you like. This one makes you follow the ground, so your village grows into a crooked, believable shape and the fields end up where the soil is actually good. It moves slowly, season by season, and getting a settlement through its first winter with enough food genuinely feels like something. The battles are there but they are not why you came.

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Run a city in a frozen world where the hard decisions are political rather than practical.

The first game asked whether you would send children to work to keep the heat on. This one hands that kind of choice to a council, so the answer is never only yours. You are managing groups who want things that cannot both happen, and every law you pass to end one crisis quietly starts the next. It is bleak on purpose, and it is the best written game of its kind here.

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A colony game where the software quietly writes a disaster story around whatever you have just built.

There is a director in the background choosing what happens to you next, and it is very good at picking the worst moment. A raid turns up while your doctor is in bed with an infection and your only generator is on fire. Colonists have their own moods, grudges and histories, so losing one actually matters. Endlessly moddable, tiny to install, and happy on a machine from ten years ago.

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Land on an alien planet with nothing and leave with a factory that covers the map.

No game is better at making you want to fix one more thing. Every belt you lay is fine until it is not, and then you are staring at a jam that traces back to a decision you made four hours ago. The Space Age expansion adds whole other planets with their own rules, which is the first time the game has really changed shape. Be careful with it, because the joke about one more minute is not really a joke here.

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Giant robots fight for you while you spend your money between rounds and watch what happens.

You do not control anything once a round starts. All the skill sits in what you buy, where you put it and which upgrade you take, and then you watch your plan run into somebody else’s. Games last about twenty minutes and it is clear enough that a loss usually comes with an obvious lesson. Very easy to play one more.

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Fit weapons and armour into a bag like a jigsaw, then send that bag off to fight somebody else’s bag.

It sounds like a joke and it is a genuinely sharp game. Items only work if they are touching the right neighbours, so packing the bag well is the whole puzzle, and there is real tension in deciding whether to break a working layout for one better piece. Rounds are quick, the art is charming, and a full match fits in a lunch break.

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Tower defence with monkeys and balloons that is far deeper than it has any right to be.

Underneath the cartoon there is a serious game with three upgrade paths for every tower, heroes that level up during a match, and difficulty settings that will absolutely beat you. It still gets free updates years after release, works fine in short bursts, and runs on anything. If you want tower defence and you are only picking one, it is this.

The developer makes a Linux version. It installs and updates like anything else on your machine. Twelve games here are in this group, which is unusually high for any genre.

A Windows game running through a translation layer built into Steam. You switch Steam Play on once and then forget about it. Every Proton game here is rated Gold or Platinum.

The game is played by streaming it from a cloud gaming service instead of installing it. No strategy game on this list is cloud only, so nothing here carries this label on its own.

A second marker, not a replacement for the first. It means you can install the game and also stream it if you want to. Nineteen games here can be played either way, and we checked each one in the catalogue by hand.