Every friend group has a Risk story, and most of them end the same way: the board left half-finished on a table because it got late, and somebody swears they would have won. Ours stopped ending that way when we found Warzone. Suddenly a game of Risk could run all week, everyone could play at once, and nobody had to stay up until two in the morning to see it through.
The short version: Orbital, also known as Orbital Empire (orbital-empire.com), is a free multiplayer strategy game that runs in your browser, made by someone whose friends could not stop playing Warzone. Like Warzone, everyone gives orders at the same time and a game runs for days. Unlike it, the map is the real solar system, the planets move, you build the fleets that fight over them, and there are three ways to win: conquest, election as Supreme Chancellor, or a Dyson Sphere around the Sun. By Warzone, I mean Fizzer’s Risk-style strategy game, first released as WarLight, long known as Warzone and renamed War.app in 2026. Not the Call of Duty one.
What Warzone fixed about Risk
Risk is a great game trapped in a bad format. You wait for your turn, you roll dice, you wait again, and the whole table has to be in the same room for hours. Warzone kept the part everyone loves (armies, borders, the land grab) and threw out the rest:
- Everyone moves at once. All players take their turn at the same time, so nobody sits watching someone else think.
- You play at your own pace. A multi-day game fits around real life. You put your orders in when you have a minute.
- Skill over dice. By default its combat has no randomness: each attacking army kills 0.6 defenders and each defender kills 0.7 attackers, so a plan that should work does work.
- Maps made by players. Thousands of them, all built by the community, from real countries to fantasy worlds.
Those four ideas changed how my friends and I thought about strategy games. Orbital keeps all four in spirit and then goes somewhere Warzone never tried to go: space.
Orbital vs Warzone
If Warzone is Risk without the waiting, Orbital is what happens when you take that rhythm off the board and into a solar system that moves.
| Warzone (War.app) | Orbital | |
|---|---|---|
| Turns | Everyone takes their turn at the same time | Everyone gives orders whenever they like, and each tick (one an hour by default) the server moves every fleet and fights every battle at once |
| The map | Territories and borders on a fixed map | Planets, moons and belts on real orbits, so what is next to you changes from week to week |
| Armies | A number on a territory | Fleets of ships you design yourself, flown along a real course that rivals can see coming |
| Combat | No randomness by default: 60% of attackers and 70% of defenders land a kill | Hit chances, plus loadouts: shields blunt kinetic fire and armour blunts energy |
| Holding ground | Holding every territory in a bonus group earns extra income each turn | Holding most of a planetary system earns you weight in the Senate, and terraformed worlds pay you in full |
| Making maps | A huge library of community maps | The Map Maker: design a whole star system, play it with your group, publish it or remix someone else’s |
| Diplomacy | Between players | Between players, plus signed pacts, declared wars and a Senate whose laws bind everyone |
Turns without turns
Warzone showed me that simultaneous orders are the single best thing you can do for a multiplayer strategy game. Orbital takes it one step further. There is no turn to submit and no one to wait for: you give orders whenever you open the game, and every tick the server moves everyone’s fleets, fights every battle and pays every economy at once, whether you are watching or not. Nobody can stall a game by not showing up, and nobody has to remember whose turn it is.
Borders that drift
In Warzone, your neighbours are your neighbours for the whole game. In Orbital they are not. Every world moves along its real orbit, so the empire next door this week may be on the far side of the Sun next month. Defence becomes a question of timing as much as position, and a well-timed attack can arrive when the gap between two worlds is at its smallest.
Bring your own map
The community maps are a huge part of why Warzone lasted, so Orbital has its own Map Maker. You can build a star system from scratch, start from our real one and reshape it, or generate one and tweak it. Then host a game on it for your group, publish it to the gallery, or remix somebody else’s.
Why a game that takes a week beats a game night
A game night needs everyone free on the same evening. A week-long game just needs everyone to have a phone. That sounds like a small difference, but it decides who gets to play. The friend with a new baby, the one who works nights, the one who moved three time zones away: a slow game includes all of them.
It also changes what the game is about. With a week to play, the moves that matter are rarely the ones on the map. They are the deal you offer on Tuesday, the border you promise not to cross, the alliance that quietly falls apart on Thursday. By the end of the game there is a story everyone tells differently, and the only way to settle it is a rematch.
Five minutes on a slow afternoon
A Warzone turn is a little puzzle: look at the map, place your armies, commit, get on with your day. Orbital is built for the same few minutes. Open it with your coffee, check the Situation Report to see what changed since you last looked, give a few orders and close it again. Alerts come by browser notification, Discord or email when something actually needs you, so you are not refreshing all afternoon. It runs in any browser and on your phone, with nothing to install.
Hosts can also set the pace to suit the group, from a tick a minute to a tick a day, and set a different speed for different times of day. A slower clock overnight means less happens while everyone is asleep.
Thank you, Fizzer
Warzone has been made by one developer, Fizzer, for well over a decade, and the hours my friends and I put into it are a big part of why Orbital exists. Orbital is not affiliated with War.app or with Hasbro’s Risk. It is a different game, made by someone who loved theirs. (Neptune’s Pride was the other half of it; that story is here.)
If your group plays Warzone, or misses the Risk game that never finished, come and try Orbital. It is free with no ads, a game has two to ten players, and you can start a private game and send your friends an invite link in a minute. New here? Start with how to play, or read more about Orbital as a free 4X game in your browser.