• Game of Clans introduces large-scale clan warfare
  • Fight for territory on a shared world map
  • Event runs until July 21st

Nine years of building the same castle, and Hustle Castle has finally decided you need someone else's to burn down. Game of Clans is live now, running until July 21st, and it's a proper shift for something that's spent most of its life being fairly content with itself.

Here's the gist. Clans get dropped onto a shared world map split into zones, and you're fighting other clans in real time to hold as many of them as possible. Win a fight, keep the region, and the map slowly starts filling in your colour instead of theirs. I like that there's an actual visible consequence to it rather than just a leaderboard number going up somewhere.

You'll need to actually talk to your clanmates for this one, or at least coordinate with them properly, which either sounds brilliant or exhausting depending on how you feel about guild chat in general. Deploy your forces well, and a region's yours. Get it wrong, and you're back to square one, watching someone else's banner go up in a spot that used to be yours, which stings a bit more than losing a normal PvE fight ever does.

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Nine years also means MY.GAMES has had a long time to get this right, and the numbers back that up. Eighty-five million installs and $450 million in lifetime revenue. That's not a small number, and it's why throwing a whole new war system at existing fans doesn't feel like much of a gamble.

Game of Clans runs through July 21st, and Hustle Castle is out now on the App Store and Google Play if you fancy staking a claim before it wraps up.

Fancy something with a bit less warmongering? Our list of the best city builders on Android has plenty of options too.

Download now! Hustle Castle