Lost & Fought › About
About Lost & Fought
Lost & Fought is a free real-time strategy game that runs in your browser. It plays like the RTS games of the mid-90s: build an army at your headquarters, take the resources, outmanoeuvre the enemy, and do it all in a few minutes. If you have been looking for games like Command & Conquer that you can start with one click, this is one.
What the game is
Three factions fight over the Lost & Found Dimension, where every misplaced reality ends up. The Knights of the Extended Warranty, the Gloop and the Bureau's own cleaning crew, the Custodians, each field nine units, a headquarters, a relic and a hero. Matches take place on six Lots, from a two-player salt flat to a baggage hall for nine. A claim period lasts seven minutes, so a full match fits into a coffee break.
The tone is serious with an absurd touch on top. The war is played straight; the paperwork is not. A Multiversal Bureau of Lost Property narrates the match, drops grand pianos on the battlefield and pays out goo for every left shoe found in the wreckage.
Inspired by Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dune II and Earth 2140
Lost & Fought exists because its developer grew up on the real-time strategy games of the 90s and wanted that feeling back without installing anything: Dune II, which set the template, Command & Conquer and Red Alert, which made it fast and loud, and Earth 2140, whose soundtrack changed style from map to map.
From them it takes the things that made those games work: a sidebar with build tiles, one HQ that trains everything, hotkeys for every unit, rally points, control groups, attack-move, fog of war, and units with a line to say when you click them. It is an original game, not a clone or a remake. The factions, units, maps, art, music and story are all its own.
So if you are searching for games like Red Alert, or for Command & Conquer in the browser, you will find the same rhythm here: build, expand, attack, all in real time. You will not find the same names.
Lost & Fought is not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts or the rights holders of Earth 2140. Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dune II and Earth 2140 are trademarks of their respective owners.
A free RTS game, and free means free
Lost & Fought is a private, non-commercial hobby project by one developer in Linz, Austria. It is free to play and will stay that way:
- No ads. Not between matches, not anywhere.
- No purchases. No premium currency, no loot boxes, nothing to unlock with money. All factions and maps are open from the start.
- No account. Type a name if you play online, that is all.
- No cookies and no tracking across sites. Visitor statistics run on our own server without cookies or IP addresses. The privacy page has the details.
How it is built
TypeScript and Canvas
The whole game is written in TypeScript and draws to an HTML5 Canvas, with no game engine and no plugins. The simulation (units, combat, wells, fog of war) is plain code without any browser dependency, so exactly the same rules run in single player and on the multiplayer server. Units and buildings are drawn in code and turned into pixel art with a fixed 90s colour palette while the game loads, which is what the short "Rendering…" screen is for.
A synthesised soundtrack, one genre per map
There are no audio files in the game. Every sound effect and every note of music is synthesised live in your browser with the Web Audio API. Like Earth 2140 did, each Lot has its own score in its own genre: a pastoral for Umbrella Flats, noir jazz for the Bermuda Desk, a war-drum march for Laundromat Canyon, chiming minimalism that turns into supermarket muzak on the Frozen Aisle, and industrial metal with a car-alarm hook in the Car Park of the Damned. The music is adaptive: it gets more intense when the fighting does.
Server-authoritative multiplayer
Online matches run on a game server that owns the simulation. Your browser only sends orders; the server checks that they are yours, runs the battle 20 times a second and sends each player only what their side can see. Nobody can cheat by editing the page, and fog of war cannot be lifted from the browser. Rooms hold up to nine players, and the computer can fill empty seats. How to open a room is explained on the how to play page.
Why a browser RTS?
Because the best game is the one you can start right now. A link is enough to get a friend into a match, on a work laptop, a school computer or a machine that has never seen a game launcher. The game loads in seconds and runs on modest hardware.
Lost & Fought is still growing. Art is being replaced piece by piece, and new Lots and balance changes arrive as they are ready.
Get started
- How to play: RTS controls, goo wells and tips for your first match.
- The factions: 27 units, three relics, three heroes.
- The maps: six Lots and what makes each one different.