no ads, no accounts
Keeping TANKS free
TANKS is free, and it is staying free. Nothing is locked, there are no advertisements, and there will never be a version of this that asks you for money before it shows you a map.
What that means, exactly
- No advertisements. Not on the site, not around the game, not between missions.
- No account. The game does not know who you are and does not want to. Progress is kept in your browser and nowhere else.
- Nothing locked. All twelve campaign missions, the whole tech tree and skirmish mode are there the first time you load the page.
- No tracking beyond counting. Enough to know whether anybody is playing it. Nothing that follows you anywhere.
What I am building next
This is happening regardless — it is a list of what I am working on, not a list of things that unlock if enough money arrives.
More of the campaign
the next thing
Twelve missions took the story from four men in a village square to a commando inside a building. There is a second act in that, and the mission format is data rather than code, so new levels are drawing rather than programming.
An online mode
the expensive one
Head-to-head against another person. This is the most-asked-for thing and the only one with a bill attached — real-time multiplayer needs a server that runs every month whether anybody is playing or not.
More maps and more kit
ongoing
A skirmish map generator worth the name, more terrain than ridges and villages, and the units that never made it in — aircraft, naval, and a proper engineer.
Making it work on a tablet
harder than it sounds
Box-select and right-click-to-attack is a two-button gesture and touch has one button. It needs a genuinely different control scheme rather than bigger buttons.
Three ways to help that cost nothing
These are listed first because they are worth more.
- Tell one person. A post in r/commandandconquer or r/RealTimeStrategy, or a link sent to the friend you played Red Alert with, does more than a donation. The hardest problem this game has is that nobody knows it exists.
- Tell me what broke. A bug report with what you were doing when it happened is the single most useful thing anybody sends me.
- Tell me what is missing. Especially if you played these games in the 1990s — the whole point of this is to get a specific feeling right, and I cannot tell from inside it whether I have.
And if you want to put money in
One person built this, in evenings, and it is given away. If you played it for an hour and enjoyed it, the price of a coffee is a fair exchange and it goes directly into the next batch of levels and the server bill for an online mode.
There is no subscription, no tier, no reward, and nothing you get that somebody who gives nothing does not also get. It is a tip jar.
Thanks for playing it
That part is genuinely the point. The tip jar is optional and always will be.
buy me a coffeeReading about it is slower than playing it.
TANKS runs in this browser tab. No download, no account, no launcher.
Questions people actually ask
Is TANKS going to stay free?
Yes. There is no plan to charge for it, put advertisements on it, or lock any part of it behind a payment. Donations pay for the time to build more of it; they do not buy anything the next person does not also get.
What do donations actually pay for?
Time, and server costs for an online mode. More campaign missions, more maps and units, and eventually multiplayer — which is the one feature that costs real money every month rather than just effort.
Do donors get anything extra?
No, and that is deliberate. Donor-only levels or units would make this a paid game with a free demo, which is precisely the thing it is not.
Is there another way to help?
Yes, and it is genuinely more useful than money: tell somebody about it. A post in a place where people who miss this kind of game actually are is worth more than a donation, because it brings the people who might make the next one.
Read next
The Margin Wars — the TANKS campaign
Twelve hand-built single-player RTS missions: hold a village square, break a fortress by cutting its power, escort a convoy, and finish with a commando inside a building. Free, in your browser.
Nothing ever replaced Command & Conquer, and I have been looking for twenty years
The genre split into esports and 4X, and the thirty-minute base-building game in the middle quietly stopped being made.
Free browser RTS games
Real-time strategy in a tab: what genuinely exists, what is worth playing, and what "browser RTS" usually means.