Free · source-available · beta
Run a country, and live with what it costs.
A grand strategy game about the whole of a state — its industry, its armies, its research, its politics and its neighbours. Six historical scenarios on a 1641-province world map. It plays in a browser tab with no download and no account.
Windows, macOS, Linux, Android — or inside a Discord voice channel.
What you actually do
Provinces have population, industry, fortification, resources and an ethnic composition. Countries have a treasury, a research programme, a political compass, claims on their neighbours and opinions about each other.
Industry is bounded by the ground it stands on: each province states the level it can support, set by its population, how densely that population lives, its land area and its mineral wealth. Building an industrial power means holding places worth industrialising, not buying the same factory everywhere.
Six scenarios
1914, 1918, 1939, 1945, 1962 and the modern day — 185 countries, with populations from World Bank totals and deposits from USGS surveys.
Build your own world
Draw land and sea, cut provinces, place countries and resources, then export a map anyone else can load. There is a procedural generator too.
Multiplayer, no port forwarding
Players dial out, so joining needs no router configuration. Disconnect and you keep your seat and your country.
Mods in thirteen languages
Mods are WebAssembly and run sandboxed, with a capability grant you can see and revoke. C, Rust, Zig, Go, Python, Lua and more.
Plays inside Discord
Launch it from the rocket button in a voice channel. Nobody installs anything, and everyone is on whatever was last deployed.
Translated into 44 languages
Arabic, Chinese, Czech, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu and more — the interface, not just the menus.
Side project · Open Fly
A fruit-fly brain plays Open Doctrines
138,639 simulated neurons, wired from the FlyWire connectome of a real fruit fly, playing the game live in your browser. It is not trained, it has no concept of a country, and it plays badly — that is the interesting part. You can watch it think while it does.
Side project · Open Animal Stage
Seven mapped brains, one world, playing each other
Open Fly sat one fruit fly in front of the game. This seats seven animals at the same world — two flies, two roundworms, a sea squirt, a zebrafish larva — and lets them play against each other, with a mouse's visual cortex watching. Every brain is a published wiring diagram, running on your machine, giving the orders its own spikes produce.
Three of the seven are local-only: the roundworms and the fly larva come from datasets published with no licence to redistribute them, so that page lists them and says why. · Source
It is a beta, and says so
Made by one developer, playable end to end, and not finished. The tutorial is young and has not been watched over the shoulder of somebody new to the genre. The AI plays a whole game and will not outplay a good player. The dedicated server and play-by-post turns are built and tested but have not been run in anger.
Being honest about that is cheaper than disappointing people later, and the source and issue tracker are public so you can check.
If you have played it, rate it
Ratings are the whole of how itch decides what to show people. The score is not the problem: it sits at five stars. The count is, because a handful of ratings is too few for itch to do anything with, and too few for anybody else to read as a signal.
It takes a click, it needs an itch account and nothing else, and it does more for whether the next person finds this than anything on this page.
Rating happens on the itch page, under the game. If something is wrong, the issue tracker is the more useful place and I would rather have that.
Using it to teach
It is free, installs nothing, and single-player asks for no account — which between them clear the three things that usually stop software reaching a classroom. There is a briefing note covering what it teaches, how long it takes and what to frame before a lesson.