Grand Century

A single-player, browser-based grand strategy game about the long nineteenth century. Take a nation in 1830, amid the fragile Concert of Europe and Atlantic revolutions, and carry it through a century of industry, reform, and conquest on a world whose population and markets move whether you are watching or not.

Play at lakesidegames.net/games/grand-century.

The game#

A world that lives without you. Population groups grow, migrate, and promote between strata. Factories boom and go bust. Prices move on a shared world market. AI nations pursue their own wars and their own industrialisation. You nudge a system rather than micromanage a spreadsheet.

War is the payoff. Mobilising population into armies, fronts that push and break, war goals, occupation, peace deals, the great-power pecking order, and the colonial land grab. Every other system feeds it: the economy funds it, population mans it, politics gates what you can enact, diplomacy sets it up.

Legible depth. Interlocking systems stay understandable through tooltips that trace a number back to the inputs that produced it.

Real time with pause, five speeds, a daily tick, with the heavier systems resolving on coarser cadences to stay cheap in a browser tab.

Running it#

Requires Node 20+.

npm install
npm run dev            # local dev server
npm run build          # production build to dist/
npm test               # unit tests
npm run test:balance   # balance gauntlet
npm run test:all       # everything, including stability runs

The simulation is pure TypeScript with no DOM dependencies, so it runs in the browser, in tests, and headless for batch balance runs. npm run season-report and npm run probe:pacing drive the headless paths.

Design docs#

The full specification lives in docs/. Start with docs/MASTER.md for the simulation model and architecture, and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for how the code is laid out. The ROADMAP-*.md files are the per-version scopes and are historical once shipped.

License#

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. The source is available to read, learn from, modify, and run noncommercially. Commercial use, including hosting it as a paid or ad-supported service, is not licensed.