A free browser strategy game you can finish a match of in five minutes

Two kinds of browser strategy game

If you search for browser strategy games, most of what you find is one type: a persistent world where you grow a city or an empire, queue up buildings that take hours, and compete with thousands of others over weeks. They are good at what they do. They also ask for a long commitment, and they are usually built around timers you can pay to skip.

The other type is the session game. You sit down, play a complete match, and stand up. Nothing carries on without you. Skyfire is a session game.

What you are actually doing

Skyfire is a real-time card battler. You build a fleet of seven starship cards. In a battle, energy fills up over time, and you spend it to launch ships that fly across the board toward the enemy starbase and homeworld. Your opponent is doing the same. Destroy their homeworld, or destroy more bases than they do before the clock ends.

The strategy is in what you bring and how you use it: which of twelve races you command, which seven of its ships you take, when to bank energy and when to spend it, which lane to push, and whether to send freighters out for extra energy or guns out to kill theirs.

Why it works in a browser

• Nothing to install. The game is a web page. The 3D ship models download in the background as you need them.
• No account needed to start. "Play without an account" creates a real commander stored on that device. Sign in with Google or an email address later and everything you earned stays with you.
• Real 3D. Battles are rendered with WebGL: modelled ships, shields, torpedoes and explosions, in a tab.
• One game on every device. The browser version is the same game as the Android and iOS apps, on the same ladder. Play at a desk, carry on with the same fleet on your phone.
• Safe to close. Shut the tab between battles and nothing is lost. Drop out during one and the game holds your seat so you can rejoin.

What "free" means here

Free to play, with no advertising. Every race and every ship can be earned by playing: a chest for each win, a free gift each day, better chests at each promotion.

There is an optional store. It sells the upgrade currency, blueprints, and tokens that unlock a ship or race of your choice. It does not sell chests or anything else with random contents, and there are no timers to pay your way past, because there are no timers. A full, plain account of the shop is here.

Things to do besides ranked battles

• The Simulator. Practise against the computer, facing whichever race you want to learn to beat.
• 2v2. Invite a friend and fight another pair. How it works.
• Friendly challenges. A real battle against a friend with nothing at stake.
• The Starpass. A star chart that resets each month. Every battle on the ladder, won or lost, earns a turn. Turns move you from world to world, and each world you take pays a chest.
• The Commander's Journey. A career map across the Echo Cluster that fills in with discoveries as your merit grows.
• The battle log. Watch your recent battles back to see where they turned.

Who it suits, and who it does not

It suits you if you want real competition in short bursts: a break at a desk, ten minutes before something else, a few games in an evening. It suits you if you like building a small, sharp deck and testing it.

It does not suit you if what you enjoy is growing something slowly over months, running an alliance, or negotiating with neighbours. There is no chat in Skyfire and no map to hold. For that kind of space strategy, the same team runs VGA Planets, which is turn-based and exactly that.