Show HN: FourCities – A multiplayer transport tycoon game in the browser

Railway tycoon · 1850–2050 · in your browser

Lay track across 64 km of hills, rivers and rival land. Haul coal, grain and oil into your own industry, feed your home city, and outgrow the other three before the clock stops.

How a match works

No install, no account. A guided tutorial is one click from the start screen.

Seed 1234, January 1960: four bot companies, 98 trains. Everything on screen is drawn in code.

Every company owns a territory around its home city. Where you build, and whose ground your freight comes from, shapes the whole match.

Raw sites are fixed by geography. Factories are yours to build, but only in your home territory, and they hire workers from your city. Every tonne delivered pays by distance and speed.

Each step adds a need on top of the last. Let one run short for two months and growth stops; stay short and the city shrinks back.

Passenger lines to other cities add a transit bonus on top, so faster trains grow you too.

Twelve locomotives arrive on schedule, from an 80 km/h light steam engine to a 320 km/h express. Each new era raises track and curve limits and brings bigger wagons. Old engines never break down, but their upkeep climbs every year.

The highest score wins: net worth plus your city's population. Each resident is worth the average net worth per resident across all four companies, so a rich company with a small town and a big city on thin margins can both win.

Cities post a new offer every three months. Accept it and it's yours alone: deliver a year's supply on time for the bonus, or pay a 25% fine.

Buy with cash in hand. Loans come in €50k steps at 6%, capped by the size of your city, so growth is also borrowing power.

When rival stations serve the same mine, it splits its output by service rating, squared. Call often or lose your share.

Mines and oil wells run dry, new sites are found every 30 months, and busy industries can be upgraded.

The match runs on your computer. Bots play by the same rules and commands as you do.

Host a room and share its four-letter code. One server runs the match for everyone.

Yes. FourCities is free to play in your web browser, with nothing to download and no account to create. Open play.fourcities.app and start a match.

A railway tycoon, in the line of Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon / OpenTTD. You lay track, run trains and build supply chains, but every match has a finish line: four companies race from 1850 to 2050, and the highest score of net worth plus city population wins.

Matches are short and competitive instead of an endless sandbox. Each company has its own territory and home city, building abroad costs three times as much, and rivals can't share track. Your city only grows if your trains feed it food, building materials, fuel and goods, so the whole game is a race to supply it faster than the other three.

About 2½ hours for a full match, with 40-minute and 15-minute options. Single-player games can be paused, sped up to 4×, saved in the browser and continued later; they also autosave every game-year.

Yes. Host a room and share its four-letter code. Up to four people can play, every empty seat is taken by a bot, and anyone who drops out can rejoin the same seat while the match carries on. No accounts are needed.

Yes. In single player you face three bot companies, each set to Idle, Easy, Normal or Hard, and the bots play by the same rules as you. An 11-step tutorial walks you through your first working supply chain.

FourCities is made for a computer with a mouse and keyboard, in a current desktop browser. Phones and tablets aren't supported.

€250,000, one city of 5,000 people and a stretch of open country. The first train is up to you.