Let's talk about
tactics.The first element of a tactically interesting game is some degree of resource management: making the biggest gains out of the smallest expenditures. The exact nature of the resources can vary considerably. Number of units, available cash, HP/MP, items. In
Heaven and Hell, your actions are resources, because they each have a cooldown period of 1 turn (or 2 if you're injured). As an evil player in a larger group, you'll probably want to hold off on attacking until an injured player has defended once or twice consecutively.
The second element of a tactically interesting game is the presence of dissimilar assets. Dissimilar assets can be easily seen in modern warfare: artillery is powerful and long-ranged, but vulnerable to almost any attack. Armor unites power, mobility, and protection, but runs into trouble against certain infantry-defended terrain. Infantry is slow and light on weapons, but gets maximum use of terrain. Each asset advertises both a strength and a weakness.
(An aside: dissimilar assets
does not mean rock-paper-scissors--which is to say, the use of options which have no in-built reason for picking one over another. Rock is only preferable if you think the opponent is going to play paper--which is only preferable to
him if he thinks you're going to play scissors. If you wanted to make RPS more tactical, you'd need to imbalance the moves: maybe make one of them an attack, one of them a defense, and one of them a recovery. Which is where I started when I was designing Heaven and Hell.)
The third element of tactical play is some quantity of maneuvering. If it takes work to get the right resources into the right position at the right time, you're on the right track. Thus we see the positional advantage of chess, and the card "programming" of Robo Rally.
How these three elements are executed in a particular game determines that game's "pace of decision". Pace of decision simply indicates how quickly a player can lose. (As Kazz pointed out, it's not very fun when a game with a short pace of decision takes a long time to play.) It's a measure of the importance of each mistake: can you blunder twice before victory is unattainable? Five times? RPGs generally have very, very slow PODs: as a resource, your HP serves simply as a "buffer" between your mistakes and losing.
If the POD is too slow, tactical errors don't matter, and it becomes simply a question of who had the most resources. If it's too fast, though, the battle is often over before it even began, with initial deployment likely determining the ultimate winner. The ideal balance between the two extremes is one of personal taste, as always.
Okay! Let's talk about
strategy. (Great fuck, I'm not done typing yet? No, not yet--food is tasteless until someone posts "tl;dr" in response to something I wrote that day.)
If tactics is making immediate decisions for concrete gameplay advantage, strategy is the metagame consideration of your opponent's nature and how you plan to use it against her.
Broadly, strategically interesting gameplay often requires you to predict your opponent's decisions, deceive the opponent about your own secret decisions, commit resources for purely informational purposes, and (unsurprisingly) make heavy use of tactics.
One of the most important ideas for a strongly strategic game is the importance of causality. When thinking about a particular course of action relevant to strategy in a specific game, the causal chain is the series of actions, decisions, and time required to bring that course of action about. In Chess, I might want to get my bishop to G7 so I can threaten my opponent's Rook, or I might want to put a guarded knight on F2, to fork a Rook and a Queen or King. Engineering such an outcome will probably take between 2 and 6 moves, but possibly more if my opponent suspects what I'm up to and takes steps to stop it. I can distract the opponent if I first position pieces such that my intermediate steps seem to be supporting a different strategy altogether.
In Heaven and Hell, I intentionally kept the causal chain short: you have one secret action, the results of which are immediately revealed. I didn't want to obscure the underlying mind game with a complicated, untested strategic superstructure.
So, bringing this all back into thread relevancy (...or, uh, not):
Kazz, it sounds like you want to play Fluxx.