An instant to learn. A lifetime to master. You have to play it to understand.
WinBolo is a multiplayer top-down tank game for up to 16 players. Pilot your tank across the island, capture bases and pillboxes, fortify your position, and battle for control of the map.
Two play styles, one battlefield
Drop into a freeform game where alliances shift hour by hour and a well-timed betrayal is a perfectly respectable move. Or run it tournament-style: teams locked in before the match, no diplomacy, two sides fighting for the island until one holds every base.
Both share the same simple rules and the same surprising depth.
Capture. Build. Win.
Bases are your lifeline — the only place to refuel, rearm, and repair your tank. Pillboxes hold key terrain and rip through anyone foolish enough to cross open ground; capture them, reposition them, turn them on their former owners. Harvest trees to fuel your build orders. Lay down roads to move faster than your enemies. Wall off chokepoints. Mine the approaches.
The world is dynamic Detonated mines leaves a crater. Craters fill with water. Water becomes rivers, rivers reshape the lines of attack, and the battlefield you started on isn't the one you're fighting on an hour later. Trees slowly regrow. Use too many of them and risk being deforested and unable to repair your pillboxes
A 1987 classic, rebuilt
Bolo was created by Stuart Cheshire in 1987 and became one of the defining multiplayer games of the early Macintosh era. In 1998, John Morrison began developing WinBolo — a faithful Windows reimplementation, and the only Bolo port Cheshire ever officially endorsed. Through a decade of active development, WinBolo grew a Linux port, a thriving online community at , and a player base that ran tournaments, shared maps, and shared strategies in the forums.
WinBolo 2.0 carries that work forward — same gameplay you remember, modernized for today's platforms.
What's new in 2.0
Cross-platform play — Windows, Mac, Linux, Steam Deck, iOS, Android, and the web, all on the same servers
Modern netcode — authoritative server, lag compensation with position-history rewind, client-side prediction, adaptive jitter buffer. Shells hit where you aimed.
Easy self-hosting — UPnP and NAT-PMP open ports automatically; UDP hole punching reaches servers behind most home routers
Built-in map editor — pencil, fill, magic wand, mazes, four procedural generators (Tournament, Natural, Maze, Fractal), text-as-terrain, image import, full symmetry tools, and a stamp library
A new AI Brain — NewAutopilot uses goal priorities, threat trajectories, and territory influence maps. Brains are written in Lua. Train your own with the machine learning tools and export them as in-game opponents. Tools provide to help build them as well.
17 languages including in-game chat and player names
Embedded replay viewer with WBN integration — review games, leave rankings, watch other people's matches without leaving the client
Free, open source, and built to last
Bolo was shareware. WinBolo carried that spirit forward. WinBolo 2.0 keeps it going — freely available on Steam, the App Store, and Google Play, with an optional supporter purchase for anyone who wants to help fund development (including, perhaps, the players who never quite got around to sending in their shareware fee back in 2001!)
The full source code will be on GitHub shortly after launch under GPL v2, continuing with when WinBolo first went open source in 2008.
