The 2026 build. The counties are generated, and so are their names.

The usual ending for a beloved app that stops working is a blog post about how sad it is. This one has a different ending, and the difference is one phone call nobody had to make.

Sumul Shah and Courtland Idstrom met in college in 1999 and shipped Strategery in 2009, with their friend Peter Ju freelancing on it — a Risk-like game that threw out the board, the plastic pieces and the dice-rolling and resolved a battle with a single tap on a procedurally generated map. It was a hit. Lex Friedman reviewed it for Macworld in April 2009, the review got Fireballed, and Macworld named it Best Strategy Game that year on the strength of his line: “There is no game I play on my iPhone more than Strategery.”

Then everyone moved on. Shah ran a design studio and later founded a medical technology company; Idstrom went to Apple in 2018 and is still there. The last update was version 3.8, June 2017. And the thing simply kept working, untouched, for nine years — until Jim Ray noted on Mastodon in August that it had stopped launching on the iOS 27 betas.

Friedman did what a developer does and built his own: first “Averse”, as in Risk Averse, then “Skirmish” after friends pointed out that “Skirmishish” was terrible. It got good. He put it on TestFlight for a handful of people and stopped, because game mechanics can’t be copyrighted and he could legally have shipped it, and that wasn’t the problem. “I loved Strategery. I didn’t feel good about knocking it off.”

So he went looking for two men he’d last emailed in 2010. The addresses were dead. He found a web game Shah had made called Figure, which had a contact address on it, and that worked. After several video calls the three of them worked out a deal, and the co-creators stayed on to point out features the recreation had missed and explain why the originals worked the way they did.

The result is on the same App Store record Strategery has had since December 2008, which is the whole point: they agreed to update in place, so anyone who paid a dollar or three seventeen years ago just gets the new game. Newcomers pay $5, and there’s a tip jar for the overcome. The new whimsy is Friedman’s — algorithmically generated country names (Pancreas, Bodgeford, Mumphaven, The People’s Republic of Nubbopolis), a snarky play-by-play, and a Chaos Mode where taking certain regions spins a roulette wheel that mostly gives you extra pegs and a region, and occasionally does the opposite.

The release notes for the bug-fix update that followed four days later sign off: “May the blobs be ever in your favor.”