For a while now we have been building something quietly: Cities of the Tide, a strategy game about towns by the sea, played right in your browser, against and alongside real people. Today it gets its name, its home and its first page of news.
Raise a town
You start with a town hall on a coast. Around it, an island with room for fifteen towns, and every one of them belongs to a real player. Send your people to the forest for wood and to the island's deposit for its one precious good: stone, iron, spices or amber. Raise a warehouse, an academy, a temple, a tavern to keep your citizens happy, and watch the town fill its streets.
Share the isles
No island has everything. What yours lacks, another has, so the sea fills with merchant cogs: trade at the market, send goods between your colonies, sign cultural treaties with your neighbours, and join an alliance to stand together when trouble comes.
Fight for the seas
Train spearmen, hoplites and crossbowmen, build siege engines to break a wall, and send fleets of war galleys, fire dromons and ironsides to hold the sea lanes. Battles are fought round after round on a real field, where what you send, and where it stands, decides the day.
And beyond the tide
At the edges of the world lie lands no map has finished: the frozen north, a coast where the storm never ends, burning dunes and a forest grown into the sea. Something lives there. One day your companies will sail to find out what.
What comes next
The game is still being built, and we will tell you about it here, a piece at a time. When the harbour opens we will send one email to everyone who asked for it: leave yours on the home page, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to see it grow.
The tide is coming in.