After leaving Level-5 last year, Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story director Yasumi Matsuno is now working with tabletop publisher Playdek on a new strategy game called Unsung Story, coming to digital platforms. That'll include iOS and Android for certain, Playdek CEO Joel Goodman told Joystiq today, but he was keen to not limit the game to those platforms.

At the Tokyo Game Show, Matsuno explained to us that Unsung Story will be based around nine small countries, each one fighting one another. Matsuno is taking inspiration from the Saxon Britain of the 5th to 8th centuries, an era following the Romans' retreat. As the name suggests, Unsung Story will focus on the more ordinary people of war - the footsoldiers rather than the Eisenhowers, as Goodman put it.

As for the tactics-based battle system, Matsuno said Unsong Story will play somewhat similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, based around a small number of combatants rather than large armies. In contrast to having a story based around a main character as Tactics did, Unsung Story lets players select whichever country and its leader they want to at the start of the game, and how they work through the various countries. That sounds a little complicated to build a narrative around, but Matsuno said that despite the game's name, narrative isn't as big a part of the game.

Speaking to Matsuno and Goodman, it sounded like much of Unsung Story is still in germination; I didn't see the game in action, and the pair still has to talk and agree about how multiplayer should exactly be implemented, for example (for the record, there'll definitely be online PVP). However, there are some concrete plans in place. A two-player digital card game set in the Unsung Story world , co-designed by Cristophe Boelinger, will precede the tactics game when it arrives in 2014.