Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries — in your browser

Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries — Trevor Chan's classic 1997 real-time strategy game — compiled to WebAssembly and playable in a browser tab. No install, no download.

This is not a remake. It's the real original C++/SDL2 engine — open-sourced by Enlight Software under the GPL and maintained for years by the 7kfans community — compiled with Emscripten. So the entire game runs: economy, trade and taxes, diplomacy, spies that defect enemy towns, independent villages and heroes, all 10 cultures, and the original AI.

▶ Play it in your browser

What works

• Full single-player — skirmish, the campaign scenarios, tutorial, and the in-game encyclopedia
• Saves persist in the browser (IndexedDB) across reloads
• Mouse + keyboard, edge-scroll, fullscreen
• Fast load — the core boots first; optional content (encyclopedia/scenarios/tutorial) streams in the background

Multiplayer (a WebSocket relay, wasm↔wasm) is implemented and verified at the transport layer but not enabled in the public build — see docs/multiplayer-plan.md.

How it works

The original engine is compiled to WASM, not rewritten. Our changes to the engine are a small, feature-grouped patchset in patches/, applied on top of the upstream the3dfxdude/7kaa source. Everything else here is the web layer: an HTML/JS shell, the build script, and a Node WebSocket relay for multiplayer.

web/        HTML shell (shell.html) + packaging tools
patches/    our engine changes — apply onto upstream 7kaa (GPLv2)
relay/      Node WebSocket multiplayer relay
build.sh    Emscripten build (engine → wasm) + asset packaging
docs/       screenshots, multiplayer design, store-page copy

Build

Needs Emscripten plus the upstream engine source. The full toolchain notes (configure flags, the asset split, gotchas) live in CLAUDE.md; the runbook for re-applying the patchset onto a new 7kaa release is in MAINTAINING.md.

git clone https://github.com/the3dfxdude/7kaa.git upstream      # engine source + data
git clone https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk.git emsdk
emsdk/emsdk install latest && emsdk/emsdk activate latest

./build.sh                                   # → build/7kaa.html (+ .js / .wasm / .data)
cd build && python3 -m http.server 8000      # open http://localhost:8000/7kaa.html

To package an itch.io-ready zip: web/tools/make-itch-zip.sh → dist/7kaa-web-itch.zip.

Credits & license

• Original game by Enlight Software (Trevor Chan); open-sourced and lovingly maintained by the 7kfans community — if you enjoy this, please support them.
• The engine and these patches are distributed under the GNU General Public License v2, matching upstream.
• Soundtrack © 1997 Bjorn Lynne & Enlight Software Ltd., redistributed under its own freeware license — see web/COPYING-Music.txt.
• Web port by redLocomotive.