Mini Autobattler

A strategy game with no moment-to-moment control at all. You are dealt a random set of gear, you place it on a compact grid, and then the battle resolves on its own — so every decision you make happens in the planning phase, and the fight is feedback rather than gameplay. That makes the placement genuinely deep. Items interact with their neighbours, so the same three pieces are worth very different amounts depending on adjacency, and the grid is small enough that every square spent is a square given up elsewhere. Because the gear is randomised, the skill is not memorising an optimal board but recognising which of the several good boards your particular hand can actually build — which is a more interesting problem and one that survives many runs. Losses are informative, which is what keeps it from feeling arbitrary. You can watch the fight and see exactly which interaction failed to trigger, and the next attempt is better for it. Runs are a few minutes, there is progression between them, and there is nothing to execute — which makes it an unusually good game to play slowly, on a phone, with half your attention on something else.