Most strategy games I’ve played have the same problem: they want your whole evening. I wanted one I could check on over coffee, set a few things in motion, and come back to at lunch to see what happened.
So I built one. It’s called Last Thaw, and it’s still in beta, which is exactly why I’m writing this. I’m looking for people to test it.
Here’s the idea. You start with five families of hunter-gatherers somewhere on a real map of Earth. Over thirty real days you gather, build, research and fight your way from the Stone Age toward the Medieval. Meanwhile an ice age advances from both poles on a schedule everyone can see. Land that’s safe in week one is gone by week three, and by the end whoever’s left is crowded around the equator fighting over what’s warm.
There’s no pause button. Build queues, research and armies keep running while you’re away, so a few minutes a day keeps an empire going. A new match opens every week, and AI tribes fill the empty seats, so you never wait on a lobby.
For the home lab crowd: it’s all self-hosted on a single small cloud box running Docker Compose, with Postgres, Redis and a separate process just for the AI tribes. The map is one script that carves real country borders into 408 regions of roughly equal value. I [wrote that part up on dev.to](https://dev.to/canad1an/how-i-turned-real-world-borders-into-408-game-regions-of-roughly-equal-value-40bi) if you want the nerdy details.
What I need from you is simple. Sign up, join the next match, and tell me what breaks, what’s confusing, and what’s no fun. It’s free and runs in the browser, no download.
Give it a try at [lastthaw.com](https://lastthaw.com/?ref=mattadam).