Civis

Building a Civilization-style 4X alone, in JavaScript, without a studio behind you, is a serious undertaking — the genre lives or dies on a lot of interlocking systems staying coherent: cities, research, trade, diplomacy, combat, turn order. Civis attempts all of it on a hex grid, rendered with Snap.svg and jQuery, and reaches v0.6.0 before its last commit in 2019. Played today, it's a genuinely interesting case: the core loop works, confirmed by testing rather than taken on faith, but real pieces of the surrounding experience were never finished.

The turn cycle actually turns

The most important thing to verify in a turn-based strategy game is whether turns actually advance correctly, and this was tested directly rather than assumed. Civis structures each turn into phases — init, upkeep, trade, production, movement, research — and a single button in the sidebar, marked with an hourglass icon, advances to the next one. Tapping it on a simulated 390×844 touch phone correctly moved the game from "Upkeep" to "Trade" to "Production" in sequence, with the on-screen phase label updating to match at each step and the map remaining interactive throughout. The four small icons in the header — often mistaken for buttons on first glance — are actually a stats readout (turn count, research, culture, trade), not controls, and testing confirmed they don't need to be tappable for anything to work.

Touch support here isn't a bolt-on so much as a consequence of good foundations. Player setup uses real HTML <select> elements rather than a custom-drawn picker, which means touch behaviour comes for free from the browser rather than needing game-specific code. The hex map itself is rendered with Snap.svg, and its own dragging implementation includes touchstart, touchmove, and touchend handling directly in the library's source — confirmed by reading it rather than inferring it from a plausible-sounding library name. A tap on the map produced a visible camera pan in testing, exactly as it should.

What's actually missing

Reading js/main.js line by line turns up the honest state of the project: the click handlers for Save, Help, and Settings inside the in-game menu are each a literal // TODO comment doing nothing, and Load Game on the title screen just hides the menu without loading anything. None of that is inferred or guessed — it's what the code says it does. Separately, one label on the desktop map rendered as the plain word "undefined" during testing, the kind of bug that suggests a name lookup somewhere returns nothing under certain conditions. None of this crashed the game or blocked the core phase-and-map loop, but it means "complete v0.6.0" describes the underlying systems more accurately than it describes the full player-facing experience — you can play a session, but you can't currently save it, and three of the four options in the main menu don't do anything.

Worth stating plainly rather than papering over: this review did not confirm the specific city-management and production-building interaction beyond reaching the "Production" phase. That's the same gap the discovery pass that surfaced this candidate flagged, and repeated attempts to locate and interact with a specific city tile during testing didn't produce a clear building-menu screenshot. The phase and map systems it sits on top of are solid, which is a reasonable basis for confidence, but it's not the same as having watched it happen.

Where that leaves it

A 7.5 reflects a genuinely ambitious, mostly-working strategy game whose fundamentals — turn phases, map interaction, player setup — are confirmed solid on both touch and desktop, held back by real, verified gaps in save/load/settings functionality and at least one cosmetic bug. This is a serious, unusual find for a browser games shelf: a real 4X, not a simplified imitation of one, just an unfinished one.