Asynchronous just means without realtime pressure. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that anytime a videogame imposes realtime constraints (as opposed to “time” constraints defined by a limited number of game-actions you can take per turn, with theoretically infinite real time to consider each turn), it engages some requirement of physical skill and instantly gives the game a different feel, a feel that I called Action.
Under my rubric, therefore, adding a timer to anything adds at least some minor element of action. Being forced to complete a Sudoku puzzle in 60 seconds or whatever makes it something of an action game. And I think that’s true!
As far as my definition of “strategy,” my definition is hazy and needs work. Ultimately literally everything a videogame is and can do is reducible to mathematics simply by virtue of the fact that they run on computers, but that doesn’t do much work in describing why a person gets different feelings playing different types of games. I guess I was thinking more about how the player gets to respond to information. Strategy is formulated in response to to known information. Adventure is the seeking out of unknown information. Deduction vs induction. Or something.
I normally think of this as a gradient. When I play a board game with a human, I have an implicit timer based on my desire not to annoy someone, but it’s flexible if I need time or am in a low-pressure situation. When I play a turn-based strategy game by myself, I limit the time thinking about a turn based on my interest level and a trade-off between desire to think intuitively and methodically. When I play a game through turn-by-mail, I have the most incentive to spend a long time planning my move and future moves in reaction.
There’s another distinction where actions become autonomous through practice, shifting from exposed thought to subconscious; as I learn a fighting game I start offloading thinking and the game slows down.
Does this happen with turn-based strategy? I’d say yes, though maybe it feels different: I develop heuristics to aid decision-making, and previous complex decisions, unentangleable, are now solvable through small processes.