The best turn-based multiplayer games are the ones you can lose to a friend across three time zones over the course of a week. No lobby to coordinate, no four-hour block to defend on a calendar, no voice chat required. You take your turn on a lunch break, they take theirs after dinner, and the grudge compounds quietly in the background. That is a completely different social contract from a real-time match, and only some games are actually built to honor it. These four are, and they cover everything from a ninety-second phone turn to a full fantasy campaign.
Async, Simultaneous, or Sequential: Know What You Are Signing Up For
Asynchronous play means a server holds the match and pings you when it is your move. Simultaneous turns mean everyone plans at once and the results resolve together, which is the only thing that keeps a six-player game from becoming a waiting room. Sequential live turns are the old way, and they are the reason so many strategy nights quietly die at player four.
Match the mode to your group before you spend anything. A crew that can hold a Saturday night wants something very different from two friends trading moves for a month, and the same split shows up one tier further out in multiplayer grand strategy.
1. The Battle of Polytopia
The purest async pick on the list and the cheapest way to start a rivalry that outlives the group chat. A match is a compact 4X on a small square map. Expand, research, punch, repeat. Individual turns take about ninety seconds, the game notifies everyone when they are up, and a match happily stretches across a week without anyone feeling behind.
Cross-platform play between mobile and desktop is the feature that matters, because it means nobody is excluded for owning the wrong device. The honest downside is depth. Skilled players converge on a small set of opening lines fast, and once your group has solved the early game the matches start to rhyme. Grab it on Steam or a phone, learn the tech tree, and it will still be installed a year from now.
2. Sid Meier’s Civilization VII
The obvious pick, and it earns the slot on infrastructure rather than on charm. Crossplay across PC and console means the friend on a PlayStation and the friend on a laptop can finally be in the same game, and the cloud-hosted match option lets a campaign sit untouched for days without anyone hosting a session.
Now the part the marketing skips. Civilization VII launched to a genuinely divided audience, and its Steam user reviews still sit around the middle after more than a year of patches and add-ons. The Ages structure that resets your civilization partway through a game is the sticking point, and in multiplayer it can feel like the scoreboard gets shuffled just as someone earned a lead. Try a two-player match on the current build before you commit a whole group to it.
3. Wargroove 2
If your group came up on Advance Wars, this is the one. Grid units, commanders with activated Grooves, terrain that decides fights before the dice do. Robotality and Chucklefish shipped it in October 2023 with a co-op campaign, online and local versus, a roguelike Conquest mode, and a map editor with sharing built in.
The co-op campaign is the underrated half. Two players splitting a map means arguing about whether to trade a knight for tempo, which is a better conversation than most co-op games generate. The criticism is population. The online player base is small enough that you should plan to bring your own opponent rather than count on matchmaking. It also runs beautifully in handheld form, which puts it high on any list of Switch strategy games, and the PC version shares maps with it.
4. Age of Wonders 4
The pick for a group that wants a real campaign rather than a skirmish. You build a custom faction, take it across a fantasy map, and fight tactical battles on a separate grid when armies meet. Simultaneous turns are the reason it belongs here: four players plan at the same time instead of watching each other think.
Where it gets expensive is the DLC shelf, which has grown steadily since the 2023 launch and creates the usual Paradox problem of needing everyone to own the same content. Tactical battles also slow to a crawl when two large armies collide and one player insists on manually resolving everything. Set a house rule about auto-resolve early. It runs on Series X and PS5 as well, so it sits comfortably next to the other console turn-based tactics options.
Worth Knowing About
Old World deserves a mention for having possibly the best asynchronous implementation in the genre. Matches live in the cloud, turns arrive by notification, and the orders system means a turn is a real decision rather than a click-through. If your group’s problem is scheduling rather than taste, start there.
Worth saying plainly: the old asynchronous champions are gone. Robot Entertainment shut down the servers for Hero Academy and Hero Academy 2 on April 8, 2019, and everything stored on them was deleted. Anyone still searching for that specific itch is chasing a corpse, and Polytopia is the closest living replacement. For persistent worlds rather than discrete matches, the surviving turn-based MMOs scratch a related but different itch.
Which One Fits Your Group
Two friends and no shared calendar: Polytopia. A mixed group on PC and console who want the classic: Civilization VII. Two people who want to argue over a shared map: Wargroove 2 in co-op. Four people who want a campaign with a story to tell afterward: Age of Wonders 4.
One practical warning before you start anything. Agree on a turn timer in the first five minutes. Every async match that has ever collapsed collapsed because one person went quiet for nine days and nobody wanted to be the one to say something. More of our turn-based coverage is worth a browse, and the wider strategy shelf lives at Strategygame.org.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best turn-based multiplayer game for playing across time zones?
The Battle of Polytopia, because asynchronous play is the default rather than an option buried in a menu. Turns take about ninety seconds, the game notifies each player when it is their move, and matches run across mobile and desktop on the same account. Old World is the deeper alternative if your group wants a longer campaign.
Can you still play Hero Academy online?
No. Robot Entertainment shut down the servers for Hero Academy and Hero Academy 2 on April 8, 2019, and all account data tied to them was permanently deleted. There is no private server option, so the closest living replacement for that asynchronous duel format is Polytopia.
What are the best co-op turn-based games rather than competitive ones?
Wargroove 2 has a proper co-op campaign built for two players sharing one map, which is rarer than it should be. Age of Wonders 4 supports cooperative campaigns against the AI as well. Both reward talking through a plan instead of splitting the map and ignoring each other.
How do I stop an online match from dying halfway through?
Set a turn timer before the first move and pick a number everyone can actually hit, usually twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Games that enforce timers automatically make this easy. The failure mode is never boredom, it is one player going quiet and everyone else being too polite to nudge them.
Is Civilization VII good for multiplayer specifically?
The plumbing is excellent, with crossplay between PC and console and cloud-hosted matches that survive being left alone for days. The design is more divisive, because the Ages system resets parts of your civilization mid-game and that can feel arbitrary when someone has earned a lead. Test it with one friend before committing a group.