Two crowns, one country. Take the field.
Play Koshtra — free, in your browser
Koshtra is a real-time strategy game in the classic mould: raise a keep, work the gold and the woods, raise an army and march it at the other crown. It draws its world from E. R. Eddison’s 1922 epic The Worm Ouroboros — Demonland against Witchland, mountain lords against the iron of Carcë — a book old enough to be nobody’s property and strange enough to be worth the borrowing. Two mirrored factions, three maps, and an opponent that expands and attacks rather than waiting to be found.
Workers are the whole opening. Send them to the gold mine beside your keep and to the nearest wood, and keep training more — an economy that stops growing is a game already lost.
Timber is the constraint on your army, gold on your buildings. A steading raises the number of soldiers you can field; a war hall is what lets you field any at all.
Every unit walks by flow field, so a group told to go somewhere will find its own way around a ridge rather than piling into it.
Koshtra is a free real-time strategy game you play in your browser. You gather gold and timber, raise a keep and a war hall, train an army and march it at the other side’s base. It is built in the classic mould — base building, a supply cap, fog of war and an opponent that expands and attacks on its own — with no download and no signup.
Yes, Koshtra is completely free to play in your browser. No download, no account, no paywall.
Drag a box over your workers to select them, then right-click a gold mine or a wood to set them working — they will shuttle back and forth on their own until you tell them otherwise. Select a worker and the build menu appears: steadings raise the number of soldiers you can field, a timber yard shortens the walk from the wood, and a war hall is what lets you train soldiers at all. Right-click an enemy to attack it, or ctrl-right-click to attack-move, which walks your army somewhere and engages anything it meets on the way.
It borrows its world from The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison’s 1922 epic fantasy — Demonland against Witchland, the mountain lords against the iron of Carcë. The book was published over a century ago and is in the public domain, which is exactly why it was chosen: it is a genuine piece of epic fantasy, older than almost everything the genre is built on, and free for anyone to build with.
They share a build tree and differ in temperament. Demonland moves about twelve percent faster and wears less armour — it wants to arrive first and pick its fights. Witchland is slower and carries an extra point of armour on everything, so it wins the fights that turn into a grind. Neither has a unit the other has no answer to.
No. It issues the same commands you do, through the same rules, and gets no extra resources, no extra vision and no extra speed at any difficulty. Mild, Even and Hard differ only in how greedily the opponent expands and how large an army it insists on before it commits to an attack.
Ground you have never visited is black — you do not know what terrain is there. Ground you have visited but have nobody near stays drawn but dimmed, and enemy buildings you have found remain on the map since buildings do not move. Enemy units need live sight: your memory of where an army stood a minute ago is worse than no information, so it is not offered. Archers see the furthest, which is a real reason to build one early.
By leaving the other side with nothing — no buildings and no units. Razing the enemy keep is usually how it ends, but an army with no base of its own can still win by tearing down yours.
Most matches run ten to twenty minutes. Faster victories score higher, so there is a reason to press an advantage rather than settle in behind a wall of steadings.
Yes, though it is more comfortable on a larger screen. Tapping any of your own units or buildings selects it, and with something selected you tap a mine, a wood, an enemy or open ground to give the order. Drag to pan the field, or tap the minimap to jump across it.
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