How to Play Trade Empires

What Is This Game?

Trade Empires is a persistent, browser-based space-trading game descended from the classic BBS-door genre. There's no combat lobby and no matchmaking — you and every other commander share one galaxy that keeps running whether you're logged in or not. You start with a small ship and a handful of daily turns, and everything else — a fortune, a fleet, a reputation, a corporation, a colonized world — is something you build, not something the game hands you.

The whole game reduces to one loop, repeated at whatever scale you're comfortable with: explore a sector, find something worth doing there, spend turns doing it, and use what you gained to reach further next time. Nobody is required to fight — a commander who never fires a shot can still build a trading empire and a colonized world; a commander who never trades can still live off combat and bounties. The systems below are independent enough that you can lean on the ones you enjoy.

Where This Actually Came From

Long before there was a browser tab for any of this, there was a phone line, a modem, and a BBS called The Underground Society — run out of my own bedroom, for whichever friends I'd given the number to. We played a door game that ate entire evenings: warp out, scout a sector, get jumped by something you didn't see coming, warp home with half a hold of Fuel Ore and a story worth telling. We printed our sector maps on dot-matrix paper, folded them into notebooks, and coordinated actual attacks across a desk in class the next morning — a good chunk of what really happened in that game happened nowhere near a keyboard.

And if some of this already feels familiar, there's a reason for that. Trade Empires was inspired in large part by the Trade Wars family of BBS games I grew up playing, and their DNA is absolutely part of this one.

The idea of building my own version stuck with me for a long time. Years later, while studying Game Art and Design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (2001) and the International Academy of Design & Technology (2007), I used it as a concept for game development work and kept building upon it. Back then I called it Outer Empires. The technology, the design, and eventually even the name would change, but the idea never really went away.

When I finally came back to build it for real, I wanted the name to acknowledge where some of that inspiration came from without simply borrowing the Trade Wars name. Trade Empires became that little nod to its ancestry — while still being its own game.

And really, that's what Trade Empires is trying to rebuild — not just the mechanics of a game I loved, but the reason a bunch of teenagers cared enough about it to plan an ambush on notebook paper between classes. The maps, the arguments over routes, the alliances, the betrayals, and the stories we'd still be talking about the next day.

So, after all these years, this is me finally building the game I kept thinking about. Not to recreate the one we played, but to hopefully capture a little of what made those nights, those maps, and those ridiculous plans with friends so much fun in the first place.

If Trade Empires manages to create even a few of those stories for somebody else, then I think it did what I wanted it to do.

— Jason Bramble // aka Blitz
Creator of Trade Empires

Trade Wars Was Never One Game

It's worth being straight about that history, because the story of Trade Wars is far more tangled than "one BBS classic" — and it probably explains any argument you've ever had with an old friend about what "TradeWars" was actually like.

And that's only one side of the tree. Sherrick's own branch kept going in parallel under John Morris — a separate, competing descendant of the same 1984 idea, not an ancestor of TW2002. Here's the part that explains a lot of arguments: that branch was also called TradeWars 2. Two different games, the same name, the same era, no shared code between them — one in BASIC, one in Pascal. There were other relatives too, like Andrew Vega's TradeWars V: Galactic Armageddon, and Alan Davenport's Trade Wars 1000, which eventually grew into its own game, Yankee Trader.

Gary Martin has described his own path simply as Trade Wars → Trade Wars 2001 → TradeWars 2002 — three real, separate steps, not three version numbers of one thing.

So if you and an old friend both swear you played "TradeWars" as a kid and can't agree on how many turns it gave you, or which ships existed, you're probably not misremembering. You may have genuinely played different branches of the same family. There was never one single immutable ruleset.

Trade Empires continues that tradition. You'll recognize ideas and mechanics with roots throughout this family of games, but it's been built independently on an entirely original codebase, with original artwork, ships, locations, content, gameplay systems, and mechanics of its own — along with the occasional wink to other games we grew up loving. The universe has some familiar ancestry, but we're charting our own sectors from here.

Historical details above draw on the TradeWars Museum, the Break Into Chat BBS wiki, and Josh Renaud's 2019 interview with Gary Martin. Corrections are welcome — this history deserves to be recorded accurately.