TESSERA4X

Play now Free · no install, no account. The game saves itself as you play.

What it is

Tessera4X is a single-player strategy game in the classic 4X shape: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. You uncover a world one hex at a time, found cities and put their citizens to work, research a tech tree six eras deep, and steer an empire past five rivals — each played by an AI that founds, builds, trades, and fights by exactly the same rules you do.

How a turn works

1. Settle and work the land. Each city's citizens work the tiles around it — food grows new citizens, hammers build things, coins pay the bills.
2. Research. Every node of the tech tree unlocks something real: a unit, a building, a wonder, or a way to improve the land.
3. Keep the empire content. Happiness is empire-wide. Cities and citizens bill against it; luxuries, the right buildings, and festivals pay it back. Expansion has to be earned.
4. Shape your ways of life. Culture banks toward policies along six ways — complete four of them and the Concord, the game's peaceful capstone, can rise.
5. Deal with the neighbours. Trade luxuries, befriend Free Cities, sign truces that genuinely hold — or march. Combat is deterministic, so the forecast is a promise, not an estimate.
6. End the turn. The rivals move, the world answers, and the next turn opens with your marches already advanced.

Five roads to victory

• The Concord Walk all six ways of life to their end, keep the empire genuinely content, and raise the wonder the whole world adopts.
• The Meridian Learn every technology, then raise the wonder the world keeps its time by — your science pours into it as well as your hammers.
• The Laurel Arch Earn twenty of the twenty-four laurels, then raise the arch that carves your deeds for every age.
• Conquest Outlast everyone. When the last rival city falls, history stops arguing.
• Score In a timed game the calendar decides: when the final turn passes, the highest score takes the age.

Every day, another world

A Skirmish is a whole game in about half an hour: one small continent, two rivals drawn at random — each with a temperament of its own — and sixty turns, with a worker, 100 gold, 5 iron and a free technology of your choice to start you off. The Daily deals everyone on Earth the same skirmish, world, seat and rivals — one a day, scores worth comparing. Any game can also begin in a later age, from the Classical to the Modern, with a grown capital, settlers and an army of the age. And across any game, twenty-four Laurels — hold eight cities, chart the whole world, keep three festivals at once — are earned at each turn's end, dated, the greater ones leaving an honour that lasts the game, and told on the end screen, where your result is one Share away. A Chancellor reads the board you can see and writes a plan for the next thirty turns — the first sitting of each age free, the rest for gold — and, once the capital holds a Chancery, can govern your seat for a run of turns while you watch; a Seer plays the board forty turns forward for each question it offers — as you are, a war, a wonder — and sets the futures side by side.

Made to be read

• A resource's category is its silhouette, and an unimproved luxury wears a pale ring until a worker fixes it — the map reads at a glance.
• Every number explains itself: the score, the treasury, the mood, and a combat forecast all itemise on hover.
• Take-backs, always: misclicked a march, or a war gone wrong? Rewind from the menu — to the start of this turn, the last, or any tenth turn before it.
• Your stats, from the menu: every game you play here, summed — wins, turns, cities, wonders, units, laurels and your bests.

Privacy

Your games live in your own browser — saves and your stats are kept in local storage, and there are no accounts. The site keeps anonymous, cookieless visit counts (Cloudflare Web Analytics); a feedback message goes to the developer's inbox and nowhere else.

The game also counts how games go, to show where it loses people: that a game was started and with which new-game choices, the window size and whether a mouse or a finger is driving, which turn milestones it reaches, and how and when it ends. Each game is counted under a random number made for that game alone — nothing ties two games together or to you, and no name, address, cookie or device id is kept.

How it's built

• The board. Rendered in WebGL with three.js, driven from React by React Three Fiber. The map is a painting your browser makes from the world itself, and the whole board is one draw call at any map size. The screen redraws only when something on it changes, so an idle game leaves your fan and battery alone.
• The interface. React over a small Zustand store. Every panel reads a fogged copy of the game, so the interface can't show you what your scouts haven't seen.
• Drawn in code. No textures, models, sound files or web fonts are downloaded. The painting, the pieces and the icons are all made in code, and every sound is synthesised on the spot with Web Audio.
• The rules. A self-contained TypeScript simulation with no graphics code in it. Every move, yours or a rival's, is one action through a single rulebook, and the whole game is plain data — a save is just the game, written down. Worlds grow from a seed, which is how the Daily deals everyone the same world from nothing but the date, and how a shared link deals a friend yours. With no screen to draw, the same rules play whole games in background workers: that is the Balance Lab, and a mod is new names and numbers laid over the rulebook's tables.

Thanks to the following open-source projects: three.js, React, React Three Fiber, drei, postprocessing and Zustand.