Last updated on January 19th, 2026 at 11:40 pm
Warlands – Strategy Game Review
Warlands is a Strategy/Board game from W-Cubed Studios, LLC, first launched in 11th July 2012.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 183+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Warlands Stand Out
Warlands is a turn-based strategy game where your goal is to destroy your enemies and take over the map until you achieve total world domination.
You can play up to 7 other people or computers, either on the same device or over the internet.
You are able to place two different types of units (one that is better at attacking, and one that is better at defending), and there are six different types of territory: plains, impassable mountains, treacherous water, defensive towers, cunning forests, and unit production centers.
The free base game comes with three styles of maps in three sizes each. Additional map packs can be purchased for 99 cents. Purchase of any map pack removes advertisements.
Full instructions at WarlandsGame.com
Map Packs:
The Divided Lands – Includes spiral, layers, and cubes maps
The High Seas – Includes fire-islands, whirlpool, and water-world maps
The Desolate Country – Includes bases, rapid-growth, and continents maps
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Warlands is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 5th August 2025
Recent improvements include:
- Fixed some layout issues
- Fixed some instances where the game would freeze
Download & Availability
Warlands is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Simple but pretty fun, custom maps would be a nice addition. There is a bug where if you zoom in/out while the camera is moving to show the computers move, it will launch the camera far away into blank space.
This is a nice simple game and we love it however it would be nice if you could construct castles and bridges. Additional units would be nice too such as a cavalry or some other unit that could move twice in one turn.
As an avid player, we find this to be a fun and simple game with easy-to-learn mechanics, however we would also like to say that it isnt perfect. If there is one thing we would say that this game does perfectly, it is nailing a fairly solid tactical war game to play when youre bored or wanna kill timebecause, after all, its hard to go wrong with a game as simple as hexagons attacking each other. A few things we would like to see: Add faster speed options with AI turns, add an option where you can freely move the camera during an AI turn without it returning to where the AI madd a move, and PERHAPS make a few more maps freely available (we do understand that may be hard to do due to balancing fewer ads with how many things can be free). Thank you for reading this.
Bad game and only get three maps with main purchase. Go play the battle for polytopia. Its better and cheaper.
Never able to play, downloaded and the Home Screen is frozen, tried redownloading and everything. Garbage.
It is a good alternative to Risk. Though it is inconvenient to not be able to place a hoard of troops on a single tile, we believe that does make the combat more interesting by limiting your full reach in a turn. We do wish the AI was smarter. We have been beaten a few times by it, but thats only when we have several on the board and all or most gang up on us early on. A good game. We hope to see more maps in the future.
This game is great, simply, and fun to play. It can help pass time and is co-op. This means you can sit done and play with friends on a couch. You have lots of variety for being a free game, you dont have to buy anything unless you want some new maps.
We can never tell if these are just bot replies or real replies but either way Im real but we love the game and we see most of the replies are 4-5 years ago so our hopes of you the maker of the game to see this is slim but dont give up on this much more you could do to make this a shiny diamond the first step is discord to be able to have people match in game to play there is still a few that play off and on so if you could put a discord link in the game menu then make it clear if your looking for a game or making a game to join because we still dont know how that works but if you do that and want idea we could throw you some but if not the discord will help bring light to this game we are sure of this but we will see you in a another life.
Good game with lots of potential. Hope the developer continues with improvements.
A really fun game, but we wish we could create our own maps. We get that it might make purchasing the DLCs obsolete, but giving us the option to design our own battlefields as a perk for buying all the expansions would be a nice feature.
Its no fun playing against a bot it is a fun idea but it needs more players.
While there is a good idea here and somewhat good mechanics, this game has a loooong way to go before its actually desirable. The controls on the menu are by far our biggest complaint. And the only way to get rid of a boring match on the menu is to go back in and complete the match, no backing out or anything similar. Keep updating though! And this may become a great game yet.
Title pretty much sums it up. Not overly exciting to us but to someone else it maybe more exciting.
Playing against the AI Is super easy or hard depending on placement rules, AI Difficulty doesn't matter, and sometimes we've just let the AI Stay alive in a corner to see who wins and it seems they're literally incapable of defeating another Enemy, AI Only match no AI Defeated ever, closest was an AI Attacking another ones last spot but just left it alone afterwards, it's just a constant cycle of AI taking land, being attacked and losing a ton of land, then immediately retaking most of said land. TL:DR. Placement rules decide if the games Easy or Hard, an AI Incapable of fully eliminating another AI, and AI Difficulty doesn't matter.
This stuffs fun just use it as resume fodder to get app dev jobs.
We cant figure out how to actually beat the bots, it seems like its next to impossible to do. The bots get more defenders, and attackers, so your constantly weaker than them.
Itd be nice to have harder AIs as we have only lost against the AI one time as of now. Really good concept and some advertising might go a long way, overall, a good game.
It doesnt seem anyones really playing this game to find an opponent, and the AI is not very hard. Its lots of fun but not much challenge to anyone experienced with abstract strategy games. Its frustrating that it has such solid gameplay but nobody is playing it. What game are people playing instead.
We can't speak to the online games but even at the hard difficulty the app is not smart and we win easily. Even if it were smart the game is of limited scope. You can buy maps but the game is still limited. It is good if you are looking for a mental break and like winning.
The game has potential to be fun but certain choices by the developer prevent us from enjoying it. Im deleting the game. 1. Ads – Im more than happy to pay a few dollars for a mobile game up front. The developers interest in incremental revenue through ads is a no-go for us though. Theyre a distraction on the screen and we cant even pay to remove them. 2. Maps – Again, happy to buy a game for a few dollars up front if we get a rich game experience. The included maps arent limited in number and poor in execution. Id pay a small additional fee to get access to all the maps if the base game came with more and they were well designed. 3. Map design – The placement of the forests and castles on the maps are poorly thought out in terms of strategy. More thought should have been put into map design which would result in more challenging gameplay. 4. AI – Ive only played on the default settings but as they are, the AI is neither challenging or interesting in its play style.
The concept of the game is simple enough. Basically risk with a maximum number of units you can place on each hexagon. However, the programming is horrible and for some reason every time you finish your turn, the screen will start flashing around and you will be unable to watch the map and see everyone else's moves. It is unbelievably annoying and gives us a headache. There are tons of other games that are exactly the same without this programming problem. Get those.
Great game, but we get matched with the same person, we wish more people played this game, hope they make ads for it.
We love this game , but we wish you would update it more often.
This game is loads of fun and highly addictive. You should check this out. The new fog of war option adds soo much more to the game. The Game Center notifications are quick to let us know when it is our turn.
This is a very clean, no frills strategy games. It's simple to pickup, but it has high replay value.
Great strategy game. But after the recent update, the map (screen) began to move all weird direction during enemies' turn. It is out of focus and making us dizzy. This issue made game play really annoying.
Update: contacted by the developer letting us know that they have removed the full screen ads. – Got tired of battling all the ads couldn't play the game. Just deleted it.
3 stars for the effort. But the game is a little basic. The special tiles hardly add any strategy. So it just boils down to who can capture the most space before being attacked.
We've tried to play this but can't get another player to ever play. Can't say if it's fun or not because there is no playing just waiting for someone that never plays.
Should add a feature where the user can make their own maps (we already bought all of the dlc).
The best board game ever wich is very tactical and very logical by making moves, placing troops and attacking and deffending troops.
This game is really fun to play. Our friends and we play it a lot when we are bored. One problem is that we couldn't buy any of the map packs. If anyone else had this problem please tell us how you got past this. Overall a good game.
Definitely worth getting; just needs a bigger player base :D.
It looks like this game hasn't been updated in at least 2 years. It would be nice for new maps or modes.
Amazing game, but it would be better with and update, maybe with new maps or modes, something like that.
The game is great! One little thing though is there is no option for team battle.
This game is really fun to play, and in study hall at school we play up to 5 player games, you should really get this game.
During games the troop placement lags out, a turn may take minutes to load, especially when the fog is on. The game crashes frequently now. An update to fix this would be appreciated.
Often times when we start a game, we can't initially place our armies in any of the hexes. None of the hexes will take the army no matter how we tap the hex nor no matter which hex we try to tap. We've deleted and reloaded three times with same results. Considering this and the fact that other people are complaining about not being able to get the DLC, this product needs to be labelled as a beta version.
Although the concept of the game looks interesting, it is barely playable. Every 10 seconds there is an advertisement in your face that you have to struggle to remove. We gave up after 10 minutes of frustration. Whatever we paid for it was not worth it.
Just add teams,campaign and bigger maps and this game WILL BE AMAZING.
We really like this game and would like to see something added to it, like textures sounds some from of battle music. But we really do love how simple yet hard this game is and look forward to seeing updates.
Excellent Risk-style game for killing some time. Simple but intentionally so.
We use local play all the time with our friends in school. Great when you have a sub.
Fun game has more depth than you think.
Fun and addictive game play. You can set the size of the battle to incorporate whatever time you have to play. Recommend For war strategy players of all ages.
Very good war strategy game. What we have been looking for a while. We would like to see new versions with texture and possibly more depth, but a major problem we have with this game is how much it freezes and crashes. That may just be us though. IPhone 5.
This is a great game. Simple and yet offers a depth of strategy. One of those great "easy to learn, difficult to master games". Sadly, we can only give it 4 stars at the moment. What it lacks is a bit of polish. The interface looks like something that could be whipped up in Power Point in a few minute, which we're certain has stopped more than a few people from looking at it. Our suggestion: spend some time on the appearance. Make the game board look more like a game board. Bring it to life a bit. Consider not using such simple pictographs for the terrain. You could even use something like an appropriate Chinese character. This would give the game the look and impression of being older than it really is. Also, explain the mechanics in the instructions a bit better. Or better yet, show them a little better in-game than a random number flashing on screen for a split second. But seriously, this game has a great solid concept. Give the interface some love and we'll give it that extra star. And we're sure others will too.
Can u add alliances? Otherwise we'd give this 5 stars. Fun game.
Dear Warlands folk, we love this game so far! The only reason we held back a star: your AI is damnably easy to beat, even with Fog of War. PLEASE give us single-player hermits some increased difficulty levels! Otherwise you are superior to Strategery in nearly every way.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.23.0
- Size: 22.73 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence, Infrequent/Mild Contests
- Developer: W-Cubed Studios, LLC
Last updated: 5th August 2025 | Genre: Strategy, Board | Developer: W-Cubed Studios, LLC