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I rebuilt a 2000s browser strategy game on Cloudflare's edge

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I grew up in Germany in the early 2000s playing a browser game called Inselkampf. You built up an island, mined gold and stone, cut down trees for wood, raised armies, sent fleets across an ocean grid, joined alliances and got betrayed by them. Same genre as OGame or Travian. It shut down in 2014 and I never found anything that replaced that feeling of checking in before school to see if your fleet had arrived and your alliance was still alive.I finally built the version I wanted to play. Kampfinsel is live at kampfinsel.com right now with real players on it. It's not a straight copy of the old game. I gave it its own world. No magic, no gunpowder – just ballistas, fire pots, and slow ships crossing huge distances. Three resources: gold, stone, wood. Travel between islands takes hours, not seconds. It's slow on purpose.The whole thing runs on Cloudflare's edge. Workers for the game logic and API, D1 for the database, KV for sessions and caching, R2 for assets and Durable Objects for per-island state and the tick system (fleet arrivals, combat, resource generation). There's no origin server at all. Making a stateful multiplayer game work inside Workers' CPU limits and D1's consistency model meant some non-obvious choices: resources are calculated on-read from timestamps instead of being ticked into the database, fleet movements live in Durable Object alarms and combat writes are batched. This helped me a lot!The look is intentionally rough and text-heavy (Hi HN!): server-rendered HTML, tables, a parchment color palette, Unicode icons, no frontend framework, no build step. The only JavaScript is for countdown timers and auto-refresh. I wanted it to feel the way I remember these games looking, not how they actually looked. Honestly, it looks a lot like HN itself - tables, monospace, no chrome. If you like how this site looks, you'll probably feel at home.No signup wall, no premium currency, no pay-to-win. Feedback very welcome, especially from anyone who played this kind of game back in the day or has opinions on running stateful stuff on Workers + D1 + Durable Objects. I'll be around for the next few hours.

HN · launched Apr 11, 2026 · 38 upvotes (top 19%) · 1 view

Niche: multiplayer browser games · 159 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -29% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial Creating the browser interface and CRUD logic is simple, but building a persistent MMO strategy game engine on Cloudflare's edge requires complex distributed state, race-condition handling, and persistent scheduling for fleet movements.

What it would actually take: A full production version requires Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects for isolated island state, and Cloudflare D1/KV for persistence, combined with deterministic tick or alarm-based schedulers for fleet movements and combat resolution. The primary difficulty is preventing race conditions, managing distributed locks on the edge during simultaneous attacks, and designing a cheat-proof real-time economy engine.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Travian, Nukezone.nu, Operation Weltherrschaft (OPW)

Concerns raised: Page/service downtime issues, Localization bugs (German language appearing unexpectedly), Email confirmation flow problems, Game mechanics refactoring difficulty mid-development, Alarm drift and fleet arrival timing consistency

Feature requests: Resources for game remake/development tips, Websocket push notifications for fleet arrivals

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 510 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #95 of 511 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 155 days after the earliest competitor.

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