We've rounded up the best iPhone games you can download today, whatever genre you're interested in. From strategy games to shooters, sports games, racing games and more, you'll find every key genre covered on a separate page in this guide, so you can jump straight to what you're interested in.
There are loads of top games to choose from in each genre too, with the App Store being one of the most vibrant gaming ecosystems around, and Apple's powerful phones rivaling the Nintendo Switch as the best portable consoles available.
So if you're a gamer, these are the phones for you, and whether you've just got an iPhone for the first time or you're simply looking to add to your library, you've come to the right place.
We’ll also highlight one new game every month, so remember to check back regularly to get a taste of the latest game to consume your waking hours.
iPhone game of the month
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Bossgame: The Boss Is My Heart
($6.99/£5.99/AU$10.99)
Bossgame pulls from many sources and fashions an intoxicating gaming stew that’s both familiar and fresh. It’s set in Mammon City – a place infested with demons, which impacts on the local economy. You play as a demon hunter couple, looking to eradicate foes and uncover the secrets of their home.
Battles take place on a single screen, with you using buttons to unleash attacks, shield your fighters, and send life-force from one to the other when they’re stunned or (temporarily) killed. Timing is everything – battles can rapidly shift from potential wins to abrupt and final defeats.
If you’re determined, this will only urge you on to a rematch. If that’s not you, it’s possible to dial down the difficulty. Either way, Bossgame is superb – an invigorating and decidedly different take on brawling that’s a perfect fit for iPhone.
The best iPhone strategy games
These are our favorite iPhone card games, RTS and turn-based strategy titles, and board games to check out right now.
Pawnbarian
(Free or $4.99/£4.49/AU$7.99)
Pawnbarian grabs chess in one hand, hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers in the other, squishes them together and shoves the result into a shoebox. The turn-based battles take place on a tiny five-by-five grid, and involve you using chess-oriented cards to move around and duff up enemies.
What elevates Pawnbarian is its underlying systems. Cards can be upgraded between dungeons. And each enemy has its own skills, such as how it dodges attacks and fights back. When your claustrophobic arena becomes packed with enemies, this forces you to think carefully about every move.
The free version calls itself a demo but provides hours of engaging play. Grab the IAP and Pawnbarian expands further, with several additional compelling characters and dungeons, rewarding the time you invest while you master the rules and fashion the best tactics to win.
Dicey Dungeons
($4.99/£4.49/AU$7.99)
Dicey Dungeons is a lively game of pacey turn-based battles. It stars game-show contestants who’ve been transformed into anthropomorphic dice and now face surviving dungeons packed with enemies. During each bout, you roll dice and attempt to best match them with abilities you acquire and manage throughout your game.
Chance can be the downfall of strategy titles, but Dicey Dungeons never feels unfair. Instead, on being at the receiving end of some duff numbers, you’ll think of how you could have improved your chances with different spells – and resolve to do better next time.
There should be a lot of ‘next times’ too. Although you can get through a dungeon in minutes, the sheer quantity and variety of missions – along with the game’s semi-randomized nature – means this is a game you’ll be dicing with for the long term.
Arabilis
($2.99/£2.79/AU$3.99)
Arabilis reframes farming and harvesting games. Instead of it being a meditative and noodly pursuit, everything happens at breakneck speed. Seasons whizz by in minutes, and so you must plant your crops at the kind of pace that would make a scarecrow sweat – all while allowing for optimum yields.
In this game, that means matching each seed’s markers, so roots join together and tasty veg grows. Watch the tutorial – highly recommended, unless you want lots of dead things rotting in your fields – and you’ll also learn how to usher into the world produce that wouldn’t so much win at the local fair as squash the entire thing.
Tasty stuff, then, for fans of quick-thinking strategy puzzlers, farming games, and maniacally prodding your screen while getting all angry at carrots.
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale
($6.99/£6.99/AU$10.99)
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale feels like the ultimate evolution of games that combine turn-based strategy, deck building and RPGs, and then squash the resulting playfield into a tiny grid. Your aim is to defeat foes that exist in a three-by-three playfield, by carefully utilizing cards. But rather than cards being dealt into your hand, they are bought or discarded from the grid for money.
Every decision you make involves weighing up risk versus reward, whether you’re grabbing a weapon, selling armor, or deciding to take on an enemy. This can be overwhelming at first, and your first few goes will likely result in a swift demise. But stick it out and you’ll find Krumit’s Tale a deeply rewarding strategy title, blessed with fantastic art, a wide range of game modes, and enough depth to keep you refining strategies for months.
Kingdom Two Crowns
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Kingdom Two Crowns is an iPhone game that kicks things off with a monarch on horseback, using his handful of gold coins to have locals do his bidding. Train archers and they set out to hunt local wildlife for dinner. Elsewhere, fences are erected to turn your ramshackle campfire into a slightly less ramshackle fortress.
This is just as well, because when the sun sets, the Greed arrive. These ghoulish beasts exist to steal things. If they nab your workers’ tools, you’ll have to spend to upgrade them again. If they get your crown, your reign is over, and it’ll be down to your heir to figure out how to defeat the Greed once and for all.
With its lush pixel art, large side-scrolling landscapes, and smart mix of real-time strategy and action, Kingdom Two Crowns is a mobile masterpiece.
Peak’s Edge
(Free + $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
Peak’s Edge joins an increasingly impressive sub-genre of sorts on iPhone: turn-based strategy games in a shoebox. Here, your little pyramid trundles around single-screen levels, aiming to smack enemies into oblivion and reach a goal.
Much of the strategy lies in the various power-ups that are dotted about. Roll on to one and it’s applied to that face of your pyramid. Defeating foes subsequently relies on correctly orienting yourself before attack.
Quickly, it becomes apparent that Peak’s Edge is easy to get into, but tough to master – and with procedurally generated levels, 25 skills, and 30 armor types, there’s loads to dig into. Note that although you can play for free, we’re treating this as a premium game, because IAP rids the title of intrusive ads, and unlocks the unlimited undos you’ll need to have the best experience.
Maze Machina
($1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99)
Maze Machina finds you as a mouse in a maze. Unfortunately, it’s not a cardboard creation with cheese at the end, but a bewilderingly complex clockwork construction crafted by an unhinged robot testing his mini-mes.
The aim is to get to a key and then an exit. But every tile on the four-by-four grid acts as a power-up. As you swipe to move, everything else on the grid follows suit. You must therefore strategize to forge a path to your goal, not get impaled by tiny stabby robots, and avoid inconveniently blowing up the key with a bomb.
Every game feels like a new challenge with limitless combinations. But the slide-based mechanics make it approachable. It’s an excellent example of ‘simple to play, hard to master’, brilliantly compressing oodles of strategy into tiny spaces and short games.
Starbeard
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
Starbeard features a race of space gnomes, attempting to defend their gardens from aliens that look an awful lot like garden pests. But in order to stab them, you must engage your brain rather than your sword arm, because Starbeard is a match puzzler.
The game happily plays with conventions. You can only move items on the bottom of each column, and your protagonist’s position within the grid is key when it comes to engaging bugs. However, your attacks rely on actions that only become available if fully charged by you matching certain items.
Starbeard therefore gives you something more than a typical gem matcher, demanding you think several moves ahead; and the strategy the game’s set-up demands ensures victory over those nasty bugs depends on your brain, rather than the dexterity of your digits.
P1 Select
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
P1 Select is a single-screen dungeon crawler with a twist. At the bottom half of the screen is a basic maze, with its walls, monsters, bling, and an exit. At the top half is a player select grid. As you move within the maze (in turn-based fashion), the player selection shifts accordingly.
This is, to put it mildly, perplexing. At first, P1 Select merrily smashes your brain out with a brick. Even though the game has just nine screens, getting to the end seems like a daunting prospect.
At some point, it just clicks. You figure out how to goad monsters, and better switch between players. Then you can work on improving your strategy – a must, given that your high score is actually an average of recent runs. Thinky stuff, then, and all the better for it.
Kingdom Rush Vengeance
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Kingdom Rush Vengeance is the latest entry in mobile gaming’s foremost tower defense series. As ever, the basics involve using resources to buy towers that stem the flow of adversaries. If too many of them reach their goal, you’re defeated and must try again.
The twist – at least from a storyline perspective – is that you’re the bad guy. Vez’nan the wizard has had enough, and is now on the rampage, attacking his nemeses. (How this is achieved through tower defense, we’ve no idea, but, well, video games.)
It’s visually smart, with varied levels, plus added strategy in the form of heroes to deploy and special powers to unleash. Even though it’s a touch fiddly on iPhone, and gates some towers and heroes behind IAP, Vengeance should be immediately snapped up by any fan of the genre.
Twinfold
($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
Twinfold initially comes across a bit like iOS tile-sliding match classic Threes! You move cards within a claustrophobic grid, aiming to match pairs and double their face value, and cards all sport expressions, imbuing them with the kind of personality typically absent from such games.
Very rapidly, though, you realize Twinfold has more in common with turn-based dungeon crawlers than puzzlers. Your aim is primarily to survive; and this requires you learn and master rules and powers that enable you to efficiently deal with enemies roaming the mazes that shift and change every time you gulp down an energy-giving yellow card.
Despite the tight confines of the arena, there’s loads of depth here – but it sits behind a vibrant and inviting interface that ensures immediacy and accessibility. Top stuff.
Euclidean Skies
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Euclidean Skies takes the framework behind iOS classic Euclidean Lands and stretches it to breaking point. Lands had you move in turn-based fashion on floating structures akin to Rubik’s Cubes, attacking nearby foes in chess-like fashion. Manipulating the landscape was as important as the direction of your next step. But in Skies, the land itself can be pulled to pieces.
This means the original’s quiet clockwork elegance has been replaced with a kind of brain-thumping chaos. You may be tasked with obliterating a giant monster’s spine by reworking the landscape, or figuring out how to simultaneously carve a pathway to a switch and some doors.
It’s hard work, but hugely rewarding; and even though the game’s a touch fiddly on the smaller screen, iCloud sync means you can always pick up from where you left off on your iPad.
Reigns: Game of Thrones
($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
Reigns: Game of Thrones slaps a famous license on now-familiar Tinder-meets-kingdom management larks from the original Reigns, and follow-up Reigns: Her Majesty. You tend to the needs and desires of your subjects and enemies, keeping the army, church, people and bank happy – but not to the point they’ll instigate your untimely demise.
Flick cards left or right and your approval ratings change accordingly – and sometimes unpredictably. Quests and themes run throughout, providing surprising depth, given the basic nature of your interactions.
The writing is great, although the game is more enjoyable if you’re a fan of the TV show on which it’s based. But even if you’re a newcomer, this Reigns is fun, with you seeing how far you can get into its complex narrative web before being brutally taken down by any number of foes.
Sid Meier's Civilization VI
(free + $19.99/£19.99/AU$30.99 IAP)
Sid Meier's Civilization VI is one of the PC’s finest 4X (eXplore; eXpand; eXploit; eXterminate) strategy titles. Its turn-based shenanigans have you explore a brand-new world, aiming to be the dominant civilization through conquering space, getting absurdly rich, or giving everyone else a kicking until your mob’s the only one left standing.
When the game arrived for iPad, that was an eye-opener, but now it’s on your iPhone. This isn’t a cut-back, cartoonish take either – it’s the full experience.
There are drawbacks beyond the high price – the game’s a touch fiddly on a phone, requires powerful hardware, and lacks cloud save sync. We’d love to play a few turns on the train and continue later on an iPad. Gripes aside, this game showcases the potential for immersive AAA experiences on iPhone like no other.
