Homefront Simulator
A free strategy game that runs straight in your browser. You build a country from 1800 to 2030, and you decide whether that happens with factories or with tanks.
Play Homefront SimulatorWhat is Homefront Simulator?
Homefront Simulator is a strategy and city-building game in which you run a country on a world map that is generated afresh every game. You start in 1800 or 1900 with an empty stretch of land and a handful of citizens, and you play through to 2030. Across those two centuries you build an economy, lay down a transport network, run research, negotiate with fourteen other nations, and go to war when it comes to that.
The game is free, runs in any browser with WebGL, and needs no installation. You can play it on a phone as well, held upright.
In brief
- Genre: economic simulation, city-building, grand strategy.
- Platform: browser with WebGL. No installation, no download.
- Price: free. No advertising, no in-game purchases.
- Languages: Dutch, English and French, including the spoken explanations.
- Players: alone against fourteen other nations, or together in the same world with an account.
- Account: not needed in order to play.
- Time span: a game runs from 1800 or 1900 to 2030.
- World: fifteen nations on the map, fourteen of them opponents, generated afresh every game.
- Developer: GY Digital, an independent Belgian developer.
How do you play?
Homefront Simulator is turn-based, on a clock whose speed you set yourself, and you can pause at any time. Every turn the game works through your economy: what was produced, what it cost, who worked, and what was in transit.
You do not assign workers. A share of your population can work, your army is subtracted from that, and the rest is distributed across your finished buildings automatically. What you control is priority: which building gets staff first when there are not enough people. That turns a shortage of citizens into a real problem instead of a slider.
New to the game? There is a guided tour, a handbook with eight chapters behind the question mark, and a series of assignments that walks you through the first century step by step.
What can you build?
- Food and raw materials: farms, sawmills, mines and oil wells, each dependent on where they stand. The same farm yields more on fertile ground than on rock.
- Industry: factories that turn your raw materials into goods and equipment.
- Energy: from coal plant to nuclear plant, along with the pollution that comes with it.
- Water: buildings that need water run at a fraction of their capacity when there is no river or well nearby.
- Housing and administration: houses, post offices, telephone exchanges.
- Military: barracks, defence posts and bunkers.
How does transport work in Homefront Simulator?
A building that is not connected to a road or a railway delivers nothing. That is the heart of the logistics in this game. You lay the roads between your buildings and your warehouses yourself, and trucks run over them at a maintenance cost. Roads wear out, and a worn road carries less.
From the industrial century onwards rail joins in, and rail is not a road in a different colour. A rail tile has eight directions instead of four, so a curve flows instead of kinking. A railway line needs a loading point, a locomotive you have built in a factory, and coal to run on. Without a locomotive there is only iron on the ground, and the game tells you so. Where a road crosses the rail, a level crossing appears by itself.
How do trade and diplomacy work?
There are fourteen other nations on the map. You can sign trade agreements with them, buy and sell resources on the market, enter alliances, and send them letters. A letter genuinely travels: without a post office it takes many times longer, and with a telephone exchange on both ends it is a matter of one turn.
What you know about another country is not free. Without a trade agreement or an alliance you see its buildings only as grey shapes on the map, and its defence figure only if you have had sight of it at some point. Making peace, a letter from a friend or a spy earns you a snapshot, with the year attached.
How does war work in Homefront Simulator?
War in Homefront Simulator is fought out on the map, not with a button. You place units at a barracks and move them across the map yourself: infantry, tanks, aircraft and missiles. A country's defence sits on the map, not in a number. March an army into an empty stretch of border territory where nothing stands, and that ground is yours within a turn. Put a barracks or a defence post there, and it costs you battle after battle, with both sides losing men until one of them runs out.
Aircraft take no ground. They bomb a garrison or run reconnaissance, and anti-aircraft fire can bring them down. The other nations do not sit still: they build their own defence posts, send columns with advance warning, and come back to retake lost ground.
Playing alone or together
By default you play Homefront Simulator on your own against the fourteen other nations on the map. With an account you can keep your games on the server and carry on from another device, and you can share a world with someone else. Playing without an account is fine: your game then lives locally on your own device.
What languages is Homefront Simulator available in?
The game is fully available in Dutch, English and French, including the spoken explanations. You pick your language in the settings; the game guesses it from your browser the first time you start.
Frequently asked questions
Is Homefront Simulator free?
Yes. The game is entirely free to play at homefrontsim.com. There are no in-game purchases and no advertising.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Homefront Simulator runs directly in your browser. On a phone you can add it to your home screen from your browser menu, after which it opens without an address bar.
Do I need an account?
Not to play. An account exists for two things: keeping your games on the server so you can carry on from another device, and sharing a world with someone else.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, in portrait. The game is designed for upright phones and asks you to turn back if you tilt it.
How long does a game last?
That is up to you, through the game speed. A game runs from 1800 or 1900 to 2030, and you can always pause, save and continue later.
Is this the same as the shooter Homefront?
No. Homefront Simulator is an independent strategy and building game and has nothing to do with the identically named first-person shooter released by THQ in 2011, or with its sequel.
What data does Homefront Simulator keep about me?
If you play without an account, the only thing that reaches the server is a technical error report when the game crashes. If you create an account, I keep your email address, your display name, your language, your saved games and your friends list. There is no advertising, nothing is sold on, and there are no visitor analytics on this site. It is all explained in the privacy statement at the bottom of this page.
Who makes Homefront Simulator?
The game is made by GY Digital, an independent Belgian developer, and is still very much in development. New parts are added regularly. Questions and remarks are welcome at contact@gy-digital.be.
Privacy statement
Last updated on 6 September 2026.
I keep this short and in plain words. You should be able to see within a few minutes what is kept about you, why, and how you get rid of it again.
Who I am and how to reach me
Homefront Simulator is made and provided by GY Digital. For anything to do with your data, including a request for access or deletion, write to contact@gy-digital.be. That address is genuinely read, unlike the noreply address the game sends its mail from.
You can play without an account
The whole game is playable without an account. Your game then lives only in your own browser storage and goes nowhere. There is one exception, described below under error reports: when the game crashes it sends a technical report, whether you have an account or not.
What I keep if you create an account
- Your email address and your display name.
- Your password as an encrypted fingerprint (argon2id). The password itself is stored nowhere and I cannot read it.
- If you sign in with Google, I keep your Google user number instead of a password, plus the email address and the name Google passes along.
- Your language choice, among other reasons because the emails go out in that language.
- When you created your account, when you last signed in, whether your email address is confirmed, and whether the account is blocked.
- Your sessions: per sign-in a fingerprint of the session token (never the token itself), whether it comes from the browser or from the Windows app, and when it was created, last used and expires.
- The one-time codes for password recovery and email confirmation, also only as a fingerprint and only for as long as they are valid.
What comes into being while you play
- Your saved games, if you keep them on the server. That is the complete game, including the letters you send to other nations inside the game.
- A summary per game so your save slots can be shown: year, name and flag of your country, population, money, number of buildings, era and turn.
- Your play profile: how many games you played, how many you won, your longest game and your total play time. That comes from your own browser and travels along when you save.
- Your friends: who you sent a request to, who your friends are and who you blocked. A friend request goes by email address, so whoever invites you has to know your address already.
I look at this data myself in a protected admin overview to see how the game is used: how much is played, how far players get and where they get stuck. That overview is not on the site and nobody else can reach it.
What I see for security
On a failed sign-in attempt I keep your IP address. That is needed to slow down anyone sitting there guessing passwords. It is used for at most a quarter of an hour and disappears for good after ninety days at the latest. The web server also keeps ordinary access logs with IP address and browser type, as every web server does; I keep those no longer than ninety days.
Error reports when the game crashes
This happens for everyone who opens the game, including without an account. When the game crashes or something goes wrong, it sends a technical report to the server by itself: the type of error, the error message (at most 400 characters), which screen was open, the game version, your language, how many seconds the game had been running, the width and height of your screen, the pixel density, the number of touch points on your device and how much memory the game was using. Alongside that, your IP address appears in the web server's ordinary access log.
It contains no content from your game and no name. I use it to find and fix real bugs, and it is deleted after ninety days.
Why I am allowed to keep this
- Your account, signing in, your games on the server and playing together: because you asked for it yourself. Without that data the service does not exist.
- The confirmation mail and the recovery mail: the same, plus the duty to keep your account secure.
- The brake on password guessing and the error reports: my legitimate interest in keeping the game secure and working. If you think that does not outweigh your privacy, you may object to it.
- What sits in your own browser: that is needed to make the game work.
I do not ask you for consent anywhere, because consent is not the right basis for any of these. If that ever changes, this statement changes with it and you will be asked first.
What sits on your device, and why there is no cookie banner
There are two cookies: homefront_sessie keeps you signed in, and homefront_taal remembers the language you chose yourself. Beyond that, the game keeps in your browser storage your current game, your picture and sound settings, your language, your play profile, what you have already seen of the tour and the newspaper, and a marker by which the game notices it crashed the previous time.
There is not a single cookie for advertising, tracking or visitor statistics, because there are none. No Google Analytics, no ad network, no social network share buttons, and no font or script from another server. Everything on your device is functional: without that storage you cannot stay signed in and your game is gone. That is also why there is no cookie banner on this site. A window asking consent for something that needs no consent only trains you to click it away.
Who I share data with
- Google (Google Ireland and Google LLC), only if you sign in with Google. Google then sees that you are signing in here and gives me your Google number, your email address and your name. That involves a transfer to the United States; Google takes part in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which is the legal basis for it.
- Brevo (France) sends the confirmation and recovery emails, and receives your email address and the content of that mail for it. Stays within the EU.
- Hetzner Online (Falkenstein, Germany) provides the hosting. The server, the database and the log files sit there. Stays within the EU.
Nobody else gets anything. I do not sell your data, I do not trade it and I do not use it for advertising.
How long I keep it
- Your account, your games and your friends list: for as long as your account exists.
- Error reports and the IP addresses of failed sign-in attempts: ninety days, after which they are deleted automatically.
- Sessions and one-time codes: until they expire.
What you can ask for
You may ask for a copy of what I keep about you, have it corrected if it is wrong, have it deleted, have its use restricted, object to the use that rests on my legitimate interest, and receive your data in a readable file. An email to contact@gy-digital.be is enough, and you get an answer within a month.
Deleting your account is something you do yourself, you do not have to ask. Sign in on your account page and choose "Delete your account". Your account closes at once, so nobody can get into it, and after thirty days everything is gone for good: your data, your saved games and your friends list. Change your mind within those thirty days and you simply sign in again with everything still there. The same page also hands you all your data in a readable file with one click. If that does not work, you can still send an email.
You can have your account deleted at any time. Ask for it at that same address. Your account is locked immediately, so nobody can get into it any more, and after thirty days everything is gone for good: your data, your saved games and your friends list. If you change your mind within those thirty days, I put it back.
If you think I am not doing this properly, you may complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority, Drukpersstraat 35, 1000 Brussels (gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be). I would rather hear it myself first, so I can perhaps fix it straight away.
Children
Homefront Simulator is meant for players of thirteen and over. If you are younger, play without an account: that works completely. If a parent notices that their child did create an account, they can email me and I will delete it.
How I secure it
All traffic runs over an encrypted connection, passwords sit in the database only as an encrypted fingerprint, session tokens likewise only as a fingerprint, and the server can be reached from outside only through the web server. The best lock remains keeping as little as possible.
Changes to this statement
If something important changes, I update the date at the top of this section. If you have an account and the change affects you, you get an email about it.