Embargoed until 9am on September 14th

Strategery is back, and I’m the developer now.

The 2009 Macworld App Gem that kept working for eight years without a single update has a brand new version, a new owner, and a Chaos Mode.

Available now on theApp Store Screenshots & art Plain text

NEW JERSEY, September 14, 2026

Hi. I’m Lex Friedman. In April 2009, I reviewed a little iPhone game called Strategery for Macworld. I wrote that there was no game I played on my iPhone more, and Macworld named it the year’s Best Strategy Game. Seventeen years later, I own it, and I just shipped a brand new version. This is a press release about that, written by me, about me, which is a thing you get to do when it’s your press release.

The short version

• Strategery, the Risk-ish iOS game that first hit the App Store in December 2008, has been rebuilt from the ground up and updated in place. Same app, same App Store listing, same reviews from 2011.
• If you already own it, you already own the new one. Update and go.
• If you don’t, it’s $5. (Inflation sucks. Sorry.)
• New: Chaos Mode, algorithmically generated country names, snarky play-by-play, online games with friends (with push notifications), pass-and-play on one device, a computer rival that scales from Easy to Super Hard, and worlds that scale from Small to Bonkers.
• Original creators Sumul Shah and Courtland Idstrom are on board. This isn’t a knockoff. It’s the actual Strategery.

What Strategery is

The world is made of colorful blobs. Every blob holds pegs. On your turn, you tap a blob you own that has at least two pegs, point it at a neighboring blob you don’t, and roll. Each peg is a die. Higher total takes the blob. Keep going until the whole map is your color and everyone else is looking for the rematch button.

The name comes from Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush on Saturday Night Live. It’s not strategy. It’s Strategery.

Why it’s back

The last Strategery update was version 3.8, in June 2017. It kept working anyway, for eight more years, which is bonkers. Then this summer it finally stopped launching on the iOS 27 betas, and a bunch of us who’d played it in airport lines since the Obama administration got sad at the same time.

I decided to build my own version. I got pretty far. Then I realized I didn’t feel good about knocking off a game I loved, so I tracked down the original developers instead. Sumul Shah and Courtland Idstrom turned out to be two of the nicest people you could hope to meet. They still loved the game, they loved how many people still felt warmly about it, and they didn’t have the time to keep it updated. We worked out a deal for me to take it on.

We all agreed the right thing was to update the app in place, so folks who bought it for a buck in 2009 still own it. That is what happened.

What’s new

The new Strategery should be recognizably Strategery to anyone who remembers the original. It’s also clearly a different game, with some Lexisms:

• Chaos Mode. Capturing a starred blob spins the Chaos of War roulette wheel. Mostly good things happen: extra pegs, a new region, that kind of thing. And sometimes instead, you know, it takeths away.
• Country names generated on the fly. Pancreas. Bodgeford. Mumphaven. The People’s Republic of Nubbopolis. Inner Wobbleby. I take no responsibility.
• A play-by-play that has opinions. “The people await your questionable decisions.” “That’s the end of Yellow.”
• Three ways to play. Solo against the computer. Online against friends, taking turns from anywhere, with a push notification when it’s your move or when someone has done something regrettable to your blobs. And pass-and-play on a single device.
• Sliders that go too far. Rival skill runs from Easy to Super Hard. World size runs from Small to Bonkers. Huge is 30 regions. Somebody is going to get flanked.
• Fully rebuilt for modern iPhones and iPads, so it will keep working past the next iOS beta.
• Contains no violence, several dice, a healthy number of blobs, and a reasonable amount of whimsy.

A quote, because press releases have quotes

“There is no game I play on my iPhone more than Strategery,” said Lex Friedman, in Macworld, in 2009.

“That’s still basically true, except now it’s a conflict of interest,” said Lex Friedman, in this press release, in 2026.

Fast facts

Screenshots & art

Use any of this however you like. Click a phone for the full-size PNG.

• 

  The menu. Classic or Chaos, a rival that scales from Easy to Super Hard, a world that scales from Small to Bonkers.

• 

  A game in progress. Yes, that region is named Pancreas. The game named it, not me.

• 

  Chaos Mode. Take a starred blob, spin the wheel, live with the consequences. This one landed on Continental Drift.

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  Winning. Confetti included at no extra charge.

• menu.png, gameplay.png, chaos.png, win.png — the four screenshots above, 600×1304
• strategery-2009.png — the original game, as it looked in 2009
• wordmark.png — the rainbow wordmark, 1400×235, transparent background
• app-icon.png — the app icon, 1024×1024 (the parchment map)
• art-map-scroll.png, art-hex-board.png — the landing page art
• og-card.jpg — a 1200×630 social card

About Lex Friedman

Lex Friedman writes about technology at Lex on Tech, builds apps and word games including Lex.Games and Tile & Error, and co-hosts The Rebound, a weekly tech podcast. He was a senior writer at Macworld, co-founded the podcast ad company Midroll, and was Chief Revenue Officer at ART19 before its acquisition by Amazon. He lives in New Jersey. He is at best the third-most-famous former resident of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania.

Press contact

Lex Friedman
lex@lexfriedman.com
strategerygame.com/contact

Prefer to paste? The plain-text version has everything above and none of the blobs.