no download, no launcher

Free browser RTS games

Searching for a browser RTS mostly turns up two things that are not one: browser-based empire builders with build timers, and emulated DOS games. Here is what is actually there.

“Browser RTS” is a search that returns three completely different kinds of thing, and it is worth separating them before you spend an evening on the wrong one.

The three kinds

1. Persistent browser strategy games

Ogame, Travian, Grepolis and their many descendants. These are the biggest category by far and the reason the search is so muddy. They are genuinely strategic and genuinely browser-based, but they are not real-time strategy in the Westwood sense — there is no map you scroll, no units you box-select, no battle you watch. You queue a building, it finishes in four hours, you come back. If that is what you want they are very good at it. If you wanted tanks, they are not that.

2. Emulated and ported classics

A great deal of 1990s strategy is playable in a browser through emulation — the Internet Archive’s software library runs a large amount of DOS-era material in a tab, legally, including strategy games of exactly this vintage. Performance is variable, controls are as awkward as they were, and saving is fragile. Still, if you want to play something specific from 1993 for twenty minutes, this is often the fastest route.

3. RTS actually built for the browser

The smallest category, because it is the hardest to do: a real base-building RTS written as a web page, with pathfinding, fog of war, an economy and an AI, running at sixty frames a second on a canvas. There are not many. TANKS is one. There is also a scattering of open-source projects and jam games worth poking at, of varying completeness.

What to expect from a browser RTS

• It should start immediately. The whole point is no launcher, no patcher, no account. If it wants an email before it shows you a map, it is category one.
• It wants a mouse. Box-select and right-click-to-attack is a two-button gesture and touchscreens do not have a second button. Browser RTS is a laptop and desktop genre.
• Progress lives in your browser. No server account usually means local storage — which is fine until you clear site data or switch machines.
• Scope is smaller. Nobody is shipping a 200-hour campaign as a web page. Expect a tight campaign and a skirmish mode, and judge it on whether the loop is good.

TANKS, specifically

Since you are already here, this is what is on the other end of that play link:

• A full base-building RTS loop — ore fields, harvesters, a refinery, a power grid with a real penalty, a sidebar build queue and a six-rung tech tree.
• A twelve-mission campaign where each mission draws its own map and issues its own kit, ending with two missions built around a commando, thirty tesla coils and one door.
• Skirmish against an AI that follows a build order, keeps harvesters running, rebuilds what you destroy, raids you while you are busy, and masses an army before it commits it.
• Every unit drawn procedurally in marker pen with a per-unit wobble, so no two tanks on the page look the same. Every note and every explosion synthesised in the browser — there is no audio to download either.
• No account, no price, no advertisement, nothing to buy.

It wants a keyboard and mouse, and about thirty minutes. If you have not played this kind of game before, the RTS beginner’s guide is fifteen hundred words and will save you the first three losses.

Questions people actually ask

Read next