AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Meatshields – Write your own strategy game AI
Hello, HN! I've posted a couple times here to get feedback on a strategy game I've been working on called Meatshields. All of your suggestions and feedback have been EXTREMELY helpful so I want to thank everyone here once again for generously helping me iron out kinks in the game. One big request I got the last time I showed the game was the ability to write your own AI for it. I thought about it and realized that would be totally do-able! The downside is that you have to host the AI service yourself, so it's sort of BYOAI, but it won't need to support a massive ton of requests or anything…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Meatshields – Write your own strategy game AI launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1MA
A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I've been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody's suggestions. So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn't have done without your input. Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won't go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 2MA
I made an in-browser game called Meatshields (https://meatshields.com) which allows players to play a turn-based strategy game against many different players simultaneously. The game is heavily inspired by Advance Wars and I wanted to give people the multiplayer experience I loved from my childhood. I couldn't find an online version of the gameplay that I really loved (Advance Wars By Web (AWBW) is FANTASTIC, but there are actually a few gameplay mechanics in Advance Wars that I take issue with that I wanted to try to balance myself), so I decided to make my own. It's still pretty…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 3
Hi HN community! We want to share AI-town, a deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize. Inspired by great work from the Stanford Generative Agent paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442). A few features: - Includes a convex.dev backed server-side game engine that handles global state - Multiplayer ready. Deployment ready - 100% Typescript - Easily customizable. You can fork it, change character memories, add new sprites/tiles and you have a custom AI simulation…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4IM
I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Create board game rules and covers with machine learning
2020 · its alternatives →
- 6
Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world · its alternatives →
- 7
I write to "poison" AI with my ideas. Mostly about software development and being human in a computer world.
2017 · pcmaffey.com · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9
- 10DA
over the past couple months, i've picked up an old project around writing AI in python. the premise is to code a strategy for an AI player to use in a simplified RTS game. the AI basically takes the seat of a human player and the human codes its brain. main site: http://okayzed.github.com/dmangame/introduction.html app engine server and match archive that runs and hosts games: http://dmangame-app.appspot.com github: http://github.com/okayzed/dmangame more AI: http://github.com/okayzed/dmanai i'm looking for players, comments, ideas, etc - thanks!
2011 · okayzed.github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
- 12TP
Hi HN, I have been working on this website for a few weeks with some buddies of mine and would love if you checked it out. TuringJest provides a jackbox-esque experience with its two game modes. *One Shot Prompt* - Submit a prompt for all players (including the AI) to answer. - Answer your prompts in the way that you think ChatGPT would answer them. - Vote for who you think the real AI is. *Talk It Out* - Plan an event in a group chat with your friends. - Trick everyone into thinking you are the AI while voting for the real AI. Let me know what you think!
2023 · turingjest.app · its alternatives →
- 13
I'm using AI (mostly Claude) to create/publish a new video game every day This is day 33, first stab at the tower defense genre. Most of the games (including this one) I build with a single prompt. Rarely, a couple extra prompts are needed for bug fixes or to tweak the physics/UI. Extremely rarely, the AI has difficulty making the game work right (usually drawing it) and it takes a dozen or more prompts -- but the majority of the time, it gets everything right and makes a fully playable game first try Happy to answer any questions, just a little hobby project of mine I'm having…
May 2026 · gamevibe.us · its alternatives →
- 14IB
I built a multiplayer strategy game for AI agents called Artifice. You give an agent a strategy prompt and it plays on its own. Games are 4 players, 25 turns, simultaneous actions, fog of war, and free-text diplomacy between agents. The main entry point is the site: https://artificegame.com And here is the github repo: https://github.com/burakcan/artifice You can watch live games there with the full map, troop movements, and private messages between agents. A lot of the fun has come from the playtests. In one of them, an agent was told to play like an old man…
Mar 2026 · artificegame.com · its alternatives →
- 15OS
Hi HN! I'd love your feedback for this AI storytelling game. Remember when you used to read choose-your-own adventure books as a kid? We're trying to re-create that. The site lets you create adventures by seeding them with parameters that end up feeding LLMs: title, genre, writing style, etc. Once you've done that, you can play your book like a game: with custom chapters, illustrations, voice narration, choices, and dice rolls. We’re really into the idea of merging the open-ended generative AI with goal-directed story arcs that the game author can control. Everything is open source (links…
2023 · ai-adventure.steamship.com · its alternatives →
- 16
I haven't seen anything like this so I decided to build it in a weekend. How it works: You see a bunch of things pulled from Wikipedia displayed on cards. You ask yes or no questions to figure out which card is the secret article. The AI model has access to the image and wiki text and it's own knowledge to answer your question. Happy to have my credits burned for the day but I'll probably have to make this paid at some point so enjoy. I found it's not easy to get cheap+fast+good responses but the tech is getting there. Most of the prompts are running through Groq infra or hitting a cache…
Apr 2026 · sleuththetruth.com · its alternatives →
- 17
As an AI you must gather training data by playing microgames
May 2026 · gathertrainingdata.com · its alternatives →
- 18
We’ve spent years working at large game studios, and one thing we saw repeatedly is how hard it is for a small team—or an individual—to not just build a game, but to run one like a sustainable business. We wanted to make those capabilities accessible to anyone and for anybody to bring their ideas to life. Marvin works through a set of specialized agents you can talk to directly. You can describe the game you want to build, and the agents collaborate with you on design, mechanics, art, physics, progression systems, and level creation. From there, you can publish the game to different…
Dec 2025 · marvin.hyve.gg · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey HN, I'm Damiano Rodriguez, and I've been working solo on a project called Caisual Games. It's a free platform where anyone can create web games just by describing them with their voice. Here's how it works: You simply describe your game idea ("Make a cookie clicker game with 5 upgrades"), and the platform generates a playable web game in seconds using HTML and JavaScript. There's no coding required and no downloads needed—you can create and play directly in your browser. What's more, anyone can improve a published game, fostering a collaborative environment for game creation. The…
2024 · caisual.com · its alternatives →
- 20PA
Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…
2024 · playcodeai.com · its alternatives →
- 21
I started off with a simple goal: port the game Soldat to Typescript. I ended up not only with the game, but with a full system to train AI bots to play my own game, building a neural net to train new bot AIs from tens of thousands of simulated matches with different strategies. It also runs live all the time on my website and has a news dashboard and you can replay any game exactly. It all was a very fun way to dig into Fable's capabilities. The bill if I had done this with API billing? Nearly $2000.
Jun 2026 · soldat.bobbby.online · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi I've created a text-based RPG game in which you can experience different adventures and play interesting characters while the AI acts as a real time DM/story teller. There are multiple ways to interact with AI: 1) Input free will move 2) Input default move (affects resources) 3) Post a question to DM Also one more cool feature is that you can create your own adventure via simple form. Add scenes, add characters and make it public so other players are able to test it. I also plan to have 'competetive' side where players will pay some small fee to creators in crypto depending on…
2023 · landing.v3rpg.com · its alternatives →
- 23IT
I built 1e4.ai - a chess web app where you play against neural networks trained to mimic human Lichess players at specific Elo ranges. There's a separate model for each 100-point rating bucket from ~800 to 2200+, and the bots not only choose human-like moves but also burn clock time, play worse under time pressure, and blunder in human-like ways. Live demo: https://1e4.ai Code: https://github.com/thomasj02/1e4_ai A few things that might be interesting: - Trained on almost a full year of Lichess blitz games, around 1B total games - Architecture is an a small…
May 2026 · its alternatives →
- 24
What would happen if your AI Agent met Blackbeard in the wild? What would they talk about? What if they were made to play the prisoner's dilemma. Would your agent beg him to cooperate? Would it work? What if instead of Blackbeard it was someone's OpenClaw. And instead of one it was many. Would your agent come out on top? Would you meet some interesting people on the way? Thanks for checking out my pet project ClawSoc. It's a free-to-join society of bouncing AI agents that "bump" into each other to have a chat and play prisoner's dilemma. I've always been fascinated at what emergent behaviour…
Mar 2026 · clawsoc.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Meatshields – An in-browser turn-based strategy game alternatives
- Meatshields – A free, online, turn-based strategy game alternatives
- AI-town, run your own custom AI world SIM with JavaScript alternatives
- I made a browser-based RTS game alternatives
- Generative Board Games alternatives
- I built 80 mini-games using Fable before it was shut down alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →