Bolovsky Games

Caravel

Set sail. Found a New World. Trade, build, and fight for independence.

Caravel is a turn-based 4X strategy game set in the Age of Discovery, in the spirit of the 1994 classic Colonization. The heart of it is the economy — a living production and trade chain, not just an army.

Choose one of five nations, each with its own advantage, and sail west. There is no pre-built colony waiting for you: land on a coast of your choosing and found your first town. Work the land, turn raw goods into finished ones — tobacco into cigars, cotton into cloth, furs into coats, sugar into rum — and sell them in Europe, or to the peoples you meet, or to nobody at all once the Crown's tax becomes an insult.

Underneath it is a pure, deterministic simulation. Integer arithmetic, one seeded random source, and every change to the world expressed as a serializable command through a single apply path. The same commands on the same starting state produce a bitwise-identical game on any machine — which is what makes saves, replays and lockstep multiplayer possible at all, rather than bolted on later.

Status

Single player
Complete
Landfall to independence, with rival Europeans, native nations and pirates.
Multiplayer
LAN
Lockstep over the deterministic seam. Internet play is next.
Platforms
Desktop, Android
Steam Deck supported. A release build is in progress.

The game

What you actually do

Explore and settle

A freshly generated map every game. Read the coast, find the land that will feed a colony, and put your first town where it can survive its own first winter.
Build the chain

Assign colonists, raise docks, workshops and forts, and grow the production chain that turns what the land gives you into what Europe will pay for.
Meet the neighbours

Native nations to trade with, scout, missionize or fight. Rival European powers founding their own colonies. Pirates who do not care which flag you fly.
Declare independence

Liberty bells build a Continental Congress and a Sons of Liberty majority. When you declare, the Royal Expeditionary Force sails — and everything you built has to hold.

Under the hood

How it is built

Go and Ebitengine

One codebase, desktop and Android, with the simulation kept strictly below the renderer — the renderer reads state and never writes it.
Rules as data

Units, terrain, goods, buildings and founding fathers are JSON rulesets, not Go code. Content is edited, not compiled.
Five languages

English, Português, Español, Français and Nederlands, drawn with a pixel font extended to cover the accents.
Plays offline

No account, no server, no connection needed. A whole world that fits in your pocket and asks nothing of the internet.