Nobody told me that Slay was out for the iPhone!

Well, not until Saturday, at least.

Slay is an old PC game I remember playing years ago. It’s at least fourteen years old, maybe more. It’s a simple but stragetically interesting hex-based game of conquest. It was great on the PC, but looked rubbish. Fifteen years later, it’s on the iPhone, still great, still looking rubbish. I does look better than the PC version did back in the day, but that’s the very definition of faint praise.


You shouldn’t run away, though. The graphics are clear and let you see what’s going on at a glance, which is far more important than any fancy stuff. The game’s completely unchanged, with mechanics it would be pointless to describe in detail. In short, though, you create men to capture territory, castles to guard it and upgrade your soldiers when you can afford to.

The game’s survived because it’s a masterpiece of design and the iPhone version works exactly as it should, even down to having an undo button just in case you click the wrong hex. (Which you will.)

I also like the structure of this version. Instead of choosing a map and then a difficulty level, there’s just a list of over four hundred levels arranged in ascending order of difficulty. Excellent.

I urge you to try this game if you’ve not done so already. It takes a few minutes to learn the rules – remember to make sure you can afford a new unit before creating it – but once you have, you never forget them. I managed to leap right in even though I’ve not played for many years.

There’s a Lite version to try, but it seems to be an older version of the game than the current one. Still, the core gameplay is exactly the same, so it’s a good way to learn the ropes.