Age of Anything
A rat town at twenty minutes: tin-roofed sheds, water-tank houses, fields and a tin-clad castle

Age of Anything

Describe a people. Then lead them to greatness.

A real-time strategy game in the classic mould: gather, build, advance through the ages and fight. Generate your army from a growing collection of cultures and peoples.

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In development for PC, Mac, Linux and Steam Deck.

Generate your army

Every race is put together from a kit of bodies, armour, weapons and mounts, dressed in one of a dozen cultures. Ask for viking frogs and you get frogs in spectacle helms with bearded axes, scouts riding newts, and a hero called Elder Bjorn Raven-Feeder.

The race gets its own name, its own unit lines through the ages and its own bonuses. The same words build the same race on every computer, so a friend can face exactly the army you made.

  • 290 parts: 71 weapons and tools, 55 helmets and hats, 22 shields, 43 war machines and beasts
  • 7 peoples, three kinds of bear among them, in 12 cultures, with 6 mounts to ride
  • 332 words it understands, and more with each update
  • One test run: 2,160 races generated, 2,159 different armies, 15,902 different units
  • A hero for every race: 2,000 different heroes in that same run

Prompt: viking frogs

The Raven Jarldom army in a row: worker, spearman, archer, infantry, cavalry, war beast, siege engine and hero

Raven Jarldom led by Elder Bjorn Raven-Feeder

Bramblefolk led by Nibbles Rootfoot

Gutterkin led by Ratty Crown-Biter

Hellenic Bears led by Kleon the Unbothered

Storm Jarldom led by Sigrid the Well-Mannered

Aurelian Guard led by Brutus the Proud

Automatically balanced

Every part a unit carries has a price. Armour, a mount, a bigger body: each one adds to what the unit costs and how long it takes to train, so a bear in bronze costs a great deal more than a frog with a stick. The game prices every unit it makes, the strange ones included.

Counters do the rest. Spears stop riders and giants, riders run down archers, slingers beat bowmen. However odd the matchup, both sides paid for what they brought, and both have an answer.

  • 46,661 automated checks run on every change
  • Every soldier line fights every other at equal cost, in two ages
  • Mass battles of mixed armies, each fought twice with the sides swapped
  • Counters win about four in five of their match-ups at equal cost
  • Whole bot-against-bot matches between races, from both starting positions
Centaur Romans with a war elephant meet viking frogs led by a war heron, newt riders on the flank, arrows in the air

Build your city

A people builds in its own style. Rats put up tin-roofed sheds and water-tank houses from the scrapheap. Frogs raise thatched huts on stilts, joined by boardwalks. Beetles dig mounds. Greeks and Romans build in stone and red tile, whoever they happen to be.

Six building styles so far, each with its own town centre, barracks, walls, castle and wonder. Towns come alive as they grow: smoke from the chimneys, lit doorways, sheep in the pens, workers carrying their loads home.

A town of white houses with red tiled roofs, a temple-like town centre and a stone castle
A frog town of thatched huts on stilts joined by boardwalks

Mount the walls

Raise walls and your soldiers can walk along them: archers on the walkway, towers at the corners, gatehouses that open for your own people and stay shut to everyone else.

Getting through someone else's takes rams, ladders and siege towers, with catapults and bolt throwers to soften them up, each crewed by its own people. The frogs bring a ram called the Snapper and a catapult carried on a snail.

A walled Roman town: archers on the walkway and in a tower, frogs at the foot of the wall

Led by heroes

Every race has one hero, a named champion with gear nobody else wears. Name one in your prompt or let the race choose its own.

A hero leads from the front and lifts the soldiers around them. If they fall, the town can bring them back for a price.

Six heroes: Elder Bjorn Raven-Feeder, a viking frog; Ratty Crown-Biter, a crowned rat; Kleon the Unbothered, a black bear; Sigrid the Well-Mannered, a spider in a top hat; Brutus the Proud, a centaur; Nibbles Rootfoot, a rat carrying a sapling

Seven peoples, twelve cultures

Frogs, rats, spiders, beetles, bears, centaurs and humans, each of whom can take up any of twelve cultures: its armour, its weapons, its colours and its names. Viking frogs, Egyptian spiders and Roman bears are all fair game. New peoples and cultures arrive with updates; the bears came this month.

  • Norse Broad Axeman
  • Roman Plated Legionary
  • Greek Xiphos Swordsman
  • Egyptian Royal Khopesh Warrior
  • Chinese Dao Swordsman
  • Aztec Club Warrior
  • Steppe Sabreman
  • Royal Iron Swordsman
  • Swamp Maceman Frog
  • Sewer Cheesehammer Rat
  • Forest Chitin Swordsman Beetle
  • Spooky Hookblade Spider
A spearman of each kind: frog, rat, spider, beetle, bear, centaur and human

Play with friends

Host a match on your home network and your friends join from the lobby, no accounts or servers involved. Play one against one, or two against two with bots filling any empty seat. Matches can be saved and picked up later.

Local network play today; online play is next.

The match lobby: four sides, each with its race's army, a battlefield in the middle

Every game something new

Roll the dice in the lobby for a race you've never seen, or type one you've always wanted. Pick a battlefield, from an old forest to a river delta crossed by fords and bridges, or a siege map where one side starts behind walls.

The bots come in three strengths, and they play the race they're given: they scout, build to its strengths, pick soldiers to counter yours and attack in waves.

And if the kit doesn't have what you want, add it. Mods are plain data: new weapons, armour, creatures, cultures, words, even a whole era. Their units are priced by the same rules as everything else, so they stay fair.

Mods can add today

  • Weapons, shields, helmets, armour and back gear, modelled in code or in Blender
  • Creatures on the game's bodies, cultures, colours and the words that call them up
  • A whole era, kept out of a match unless its host allows it
  • Battlefields and match rules

Still to come

  • A mod list in the game; today mods are switched on in a settings file
  • Mod buildings, research, sounds and new body shapes
  • Sharing mods through the Steam Workshop
  • The tools we build mods with: a starter mod, the checks, and a guide an AI agent can follow
The lobby's battlefield cards side by side: Old Forest, Reed Meadow, Reed Meadow for two against two, River Delta

Steam Deck and controllers

Made to be played with a pad as well as a mouse. Tap A on anything you command and its orders open on a ring around it: what to build, whom to train, where to send them. A reticle selects, a circle gathers an army.

Pick up the mouse at any moment and the game follows; the pad takes over again the moment you touch it.

The controller build ring around a worker: a house, farm, barracks and more

Made by one guy and his AI

Age of Anything is made by one guy and his AI, and made with love. First prototype in 24 hours went from ideas to gameplay, and hasn't stopped growing since.

The first race generator: angry swamp frogs with reed spears against sewer rats with cheese hammers, in simple shapes
Day one: the first race generator.