Open Historia Wiki

How to install, play and master Open Historia — the free, open-source, AI-driven grand strategy game.

Open Historia is a free, open-source grand strategy game. You take a country on a world map, write your orders in plain English, and skip time forward. A language model plays the rest of the world — every other country's leader, the events that befall them, the wars they start and the deals they cut — and hands you back a history of what happened.

It is not a game with a tech tree and a build queue. There are no ticks and no clock running down. Nothing happens until you decide to advance time, and when you do, the world moves as far as you asked and tells you about it.

Start here

You need step 2. Open Historia ships with no model of its own and does not sell you one — you bring a key from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic or any compatible service, or you point it at a model running on your own machine. Without one, the game still opens and the map still works, but the world stops responding: time skips fall back to canned events and the advisor cannot answer. Google's free tier is enough for solo play, and a local model costs nothing at all.

Deep dives

Every system, with the actual rules and numbers rather than a summary.

Things worth knowing up front

There is no multiplayer. Open Historia is a single-player game. You can host it on your own machine and reach it from your phone or another computer on the same network, and you can share scenarios with other players through the Community Hub — but there is no lobby, no shared session and no simultaneous turns. Anything you have read elsewhere describing a multiplayer lobby is wrong.

Your API key never leaves your machine. Provider settings live in your browser's local storage, or in the desktop app's own profile. No Open Historia server ever sees it. On the desktop build, requests to providers that refuse browser calls are relayed through the local server, which listens on loopback only unless you deliberately open it up.

The game is only as good as the model. Diplomacy, events, combat adjudication and the advisor are all model output. A larger model gives you a world that remembers what it did last turn and reacts in character; a very small local model will give you a thinner one. See AI providers and models for what to pick.

Some features are beta-only. Pages and sections marked beta describe systems that have not reached the stable release. The beta build installs alongside the stable app and keeps its own saves, so trying it costs you nothing.

If something is broken

Start with Troubleshooting — it covers the common ones: a blank map, greyed-out AI, turns that take forever, and CORS errors from a local model. Beyond that, the Discord is the fastest place to get help, and bugs go to GitHub issues.

Open Historia is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later) and built by contributors. If you want to work on it rather than play it, start with CONTRIBUTING.md — contributions are accepted under a contributor agreement that you sign on your first pull request — and the developer documentation in docs/.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-09-24 · main e62a1c55 · beta 2f48a6c2. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.