A road-network economy in a browser tab
Expeditions II is a city-building game built around an indirect-control economy: you place buildings and roads, and little carriers and craftsmen decide the rest. This post is about that design, why it keeps pulling people in, and how a game like it ends up running in an ordinary browser tab.
What the design actually is
Where most city-builders have you click a tile and drop a building on it, this one makes you build a road network first and lets the economy run itself. Every hut, mine and warehouse sits on a road, and every road walks a chain of carriers who hand goods off from flag to flag. Nobody in the game takes orders directly — you shape the terrain of incentives (where the roads go, what gets built where) and watch the settlement respond. That indirection, more than the graphics or the setting, is the point of the design.
The economy itself is a chain of dependencies you can trace by eye: a woodcutter needs trees and feeds a sawmill, the sawmill's boards feed the builders queued up behind every construction site, and a mine needs food walked all the way up a mountain before it will produce anything at all. Nothing in that chain is invisible — you can follow a single plank from the tree it came from to the building it went into — which is part of why the game rewards close attention rather than raw speed. Add a small-scale military layer (soldiers occupying and expanding your border, one contested frontier hut at a time) and a rival AI doing the same thing on the same map, and the result is a city-builder that is also, quietly, a strategy game.
Why it holds up
A design has to earn lasting interest. This economy is deep enough that players keep discovering supply-chain optimizations, and simple enough that a new player can watch a road and understand what's happening within a few minutes. That combination — genuinely deep, immediately legible — is rarer than it sounds.
There is also a practical gap: games in this mould are rarely one click away. Installing, configuring and launching is a long way from "I want to try this" to "I am now playing this". A browser tab closes that gap.
Expeditions II: the design in a browser tab
Expeditions II is an independent game, written from scratch in TypeScript and rendered with WebGL, that runs in an ordinary browser tab. There is no installer, no plugin, and nothing to configure — open the page, pick a map and a nation, and the settlement starts. It ships no graphics, sounds or maps from any commercial game. Its art is its own, drawn and generated for it, as the about page describes along with what is and isn't finished yet. It is a game of its own, not affiliated with or endorsed by any publisher.
What's next if you want more
The guides section covers specific mechanics — building placement, roads and carriers, and more — in the kind of depth a manual used to. The encyclopedia is the reference: every Expeditions II building, its cost, and what it produces. German-speaking readers can start at Expeditions II auf Deutsch.