Konkr Legacy

Konkr Legacy is what happens when a solo developer's first real HTML5 game gets open-sourced six years after the fact, not as a finished release but as an archive: "if you intend to learn from this code, be careful," the README warns, "this was my first HTML5 game and it was where I learned how to NOT code a game." That's an unusually honest thing for a developer to say about their own repository, and it turns out to undersell the actual game a little. Once it's actually running, Konkr Legacy is a clean, playable hex-conquest game in the tradition of Sean O'Connor's Slay, and on a touchscreen — which is the entire point of this shelf — it holds up better than its own packaging suggests it would.

Getting it to run at all took two fixes first

This matters enough to lead with, because it shaped everything else about the review. The repository's static/index.html — the file you'd get if you cloned this repo and built it yourself — has no <meta name="viewport"> tag. Without one, a mobile browser has no way to know the page is meant to fill the screen, so it falls back to the classic desktop-width layout (980 pixels) and zooms the whole thing out to fit. The game still "worked" in the sense that nothing crashed, but every on-screen button ended up somewhere other than where it visually appeared, and the actual playable map was squeezed into a small strip of the screen. Comparing against the developer's own live deployment at konkr.io/legacy confirmed this isn't how the game is meant to look — that page has the meta tag, this repository doesn't.

The second issue compounds the first. The same index.html includes a <div id="debug"> that is always present in the markup, and the game's own debug-mode check is just document.getElementById("debug") — no environment variable, no build flag, nothing gating it. That means every load of the repository's own HTML starts the game engine paused on a "debug breakpoint," displaying a raw developer console with a tiny play button that has to be clicked before anything happens. Confirmed directly: tapping that button with a real emulated touch event did nothing at all, on multiple attempts; only a genuine mouse click resolved it. A phone player building this repo as-is would never get past the pause screen. The live site again shows neither symptom, so this is a gap in the open-source packaging specifically, not something the developer shipped to actual users.

Both are fixed for the version hosted here — the debug markup stripped, the viewport tag added — and what follows describes that fixed, working build, confirmed by actually playing it rather than by reading the source and assuming it would behave the same way once corrected.

The conquest loop is simple, and the economy gives it teeth

Once it loads properly, Konkr Legacy is immediately legible: a procedurally generated island, carved into hex regions, each with its own colour and a scatter of AI-controlled factions (six of them in the build tested, alongside the human player and a neutral bandit faction that raids undefended territory). Tapping a hex you own — or one adjacent to territory you own — selects it; a region's strongest unit becomes its defender automatically, and hiring more soldiers costs gold drawn from a shared treasury that also has to cover upkeep on every unit already standing. Spend too aggressively on troops and the treasury runs dry; spend too little and a neighbouring faction or a bandit raid takes an undefended hex. That tension is the whole game, and it's an old, proven one — Slay ran on exactly this loop in 2002, and a long line of browser and mobile clones have kept using it since — but Konkr Legacy executes it cleanly rather than just gesturing at it. The in-game tutorial only interrupts once, with a popover explaining the treasury the first time it becomes relevant, rather than front-loading a rules page nobody reads.

Touch controls, actually tested

Weighing this heavily is the whole reason this section exists, so it was tested directly rather than inferred from the presence of Phaser's pointer bindings. Dragging a finger across the map pans the camera smoothly and in the correct direction; tapping a hex selects it and the interface responds by centring or highlighting the selection; and the bottom UI bar — sound toggle, reset, fullscreen, undo, end-turn — sits at a comfortable size for a thumb on a 390-pixel-wide viewport once the viewport bug above is fixed. Nothing about the core interaction requires a keyboard or a mouse. The handful of keyboard shortcuts wired up in the source (N for step-into, Space for play, and so on) are debug-only commands gated behind the same debug flag already discussed, not anything a normal player needs.

The map itself is generated fresh each time — RegionRandomizer and LandGenerator in the source confirm there's no fixed level list, just a seeded procedural island and a seeded region layout logged to the console on every new game. That's good for replay variety in the sense that no two games look the same, but it also means there's no authored content to progress through: every session is another skirmish against the same style of AI opponent, not a campaign building toward anything.

An archive, not a live project

The GitHub repository has one star and zero forks as of this review, four years after the code was made public, and the developer's own framing — "made in 2016... open source in 2022... it is the predecessor to Konkr, a sequel developed with typescript and Phaser 3" — makes it clear this isn't where he'd point a new player. The live konkr.io site actively steers visitors toward the newer, closed-source Konkr instead. None of that makes Legacy worse to actually play in the moment, but it does mean nobody is fixing the packaging issues above, and nobody is likely to. Building it also requires an old webpack 1.x / Babel 6 toolchain that no longer resolves cleanly on a current Node.js install without --legacy-peer-deps — workable, but a sign of exactly how long this codebase has been left alone.

Verdict

Konkr Legacy earns its place here on the strength of what it actually does once it's running: a clean, free, ad-free hex-conquest game whose touch controls genuinely work, tested by playing it rather than assumed from the code. It loses ground on everything around that core — an unmaintained repository that doesn't run correctly out of the box, no campaign or authored content to chase, and an author who's already moved on to a better version of the same idea. Play it for a skirmish or two if hex conquest on a phone sounds appealing and you don't already own a copy of Slay; don't expect ongoing support, and don't be surprised that even its own creator would rather you played the sequel.