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.
Discussion (25 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Also, actual alarm drift in prod with concurrent fleet arrivals? And client reconciliation when the countdown hits zero but the alarm hasn't fired?
Clean aesthetic.
no cross DO transactions are happening. the problem won't be (yet) that fleet arrivals will be just miliseconds apart.
with alarm drifts: i havent observes that beahiuvor yet three is a drift check performed every 100 alarm cylces with self correction if necessary.
on the client sync part: countdown runs on the epoch by the server. hits zero, waits a sec for buffer, hard-reloads. if the alarm hasn't fired yet, next alarm cycle (shortly after) resolves it. safety net: any fleet 5+ minutes overdue gets cross-checked, with exponential backoff retry on failed return deliveries. no websocket push on this one as mentioned earlier.... the reload is the reconciliation.
thanks and hope you give it a try!
Edited for typos.
websockets + stateful server would be the right call for anything realtime. for tick-based strategy with hour-long timers, DOs feel like the cleanest fit - i get per-island isolation, alarms, and storage in one primitive without managing a connection pool.
it's designed for once-a-day check-ins though, not minute-by-minute refreshing. buildings are fast in the beginning and take real time later to upgrade. more like working in a garden than playing a game. easier to walk away from than you'd think.