About the Game

The game

A multiplayer tank game for up to 16 players. You pilot a tank across a top-down island, capturing pillboxes and bases, fortifying your position — harvesting trees, building roads and walls, laying mines — as you battle for control of the map. It plays as freeform diplomacy games or tournament-style competitive matches, both built on tactical combat, base-building and resource management.

“An instant to learn, but a lifetime to master. You have to play it to understand.”

  • Cross-platform multiplayer — Windows, Mac, Linux, Steam Deck, iOS, Android & Web all play together
  • 40+ Steam achievements — with rich presence and join support
  • Authoritative server — lag compensation and adaptive jitter buffer
  • AI players — Lua-scripted brains with an ML training environment
  • Full map editor — drawing tools and four procedural generators
  • Embedded log viewer — replay scrubber with WinBolo.net integration
More details below ↓

Screenshots

WinBolo gameplay WinBolo gameplay WinBolo gameplay WinBolo menu WinBolo menu WinBolo map editor WinBolo map editor WinBolo log browser WinBolo log viewer

What's new in WinBolo 2.0

Platform & gameplay

  • One shared codebase — Windows, Mac, Linux, Steam Deck, iOS, Android and Web players all join the same servers
  • Steam integration — 40+ achievements, presence with join support, and WinBolo.net sign-in & account linking
  • Modern presentation — high-resolution SVG/PNG graphics (themes coming), dynamic window resizing, 17 languages, optional smooth scrolling and crash reporting
  • Pixel-perfect aiming — fixes alignment that made some pilltakes impossible from certain directions
  • Original-style movement — tanks can once again nudge and push other players
  • Smarter spawns — start locations bias toward areas clear of hostiles and closer to your own base

Server & networking

  • Full lobby — team selection, optional auto-balance by WinBolo.net ranking, map-skip and full map voting, and round continuation between matches
  • Authoritative server — the server runs the simulation and clients send inputs, closing the door on the trust-the-peer cheats of earlier versions
  • Easy self-hosting — automatic port opening via UPnP and NAT-PMP/PCP, plus UDP hole punching for NAT traversal
  • Modern netcode — per-client lag compensation with position-history rewind, a per-player adaptive jitter buffer, and client-side prediction & reconciliation
  • Bots in the lobby — add AI brains that run on your server or your client
  • Map management — server folder map selection or a random map each round; the server returns to the lobby when everyone leaves

AI brains & developer tools

  • NewAutopilot AI — goal-priority decisions, game-phase detection, territory influence mapping, threat calculation with forward simulation, multiple pilltake strategies and inter-brain communication
  • Lua scripting — brains are written in Lua with C helpers for performance-critical code, plus a brain-visualisation debugging tool
  • Machine-learning ready — a C library exposes the full simulation as a steppable environment running dozens of instances at once, with a Python / Stable-Baselines 3 interface, a custom PyTorch network and ONNX export for in-game use

Map editor

  • Full drawing toolkit — pencil, lines and shapes, flood fill, magic wand, marquee selection, mine patterns and a maze tool
  • Four procedural generators — Tournament (symmetric competitive), Natural (organic styles), Maze (labyrinths) and Fractal (diamond-square terrain); every generator is seeded, so a seed string reproduces a map exactly
  • Text & image tools — render text in bundled or system fonts, and import PNG/JPG with automatic terrain conversion
  • Reusable stamps — save any selection as a stamp and browse a thumbnail library
  • Validation & stats — symmetry and rotation, one-click validation, and a live stats panel for terrain percentages, mine density, spacing and symmetry scoring
  • Built for editing — continuous zoom and pan, a 256×256 minimap, .map save/load, PNG export, 100-deep undo/redo and dockable panels

Log viewer

  • Built in — the log viewer is embedded in the game with WinBolo.net integration
  • Find the games that matter — filter by date, player or review ranking, and review or rank logs in-game once signed in to WinBolo.net
  • On the web too — logs are viewable directly on the WinBolo.net website
  • Smooth playback — fast-forward / rewind scrubber and display zoom