// the find
FreezingMoon/AncientBeast
The Turn Based Strategy Game/eSport. Master your beasts! 🐺
Ancient Beast is a browser-based turn-based strategy game played on a hex grid, built with TypeScript and Phaser. Think chess crossed with a creature-collection game — you pick units from a roster of ~30 beasts, each with four abilities, and fight 1v1 or 2v2 matches online. It's been in active development since 2013 and is fully playable today at AncientBeast.com.
The unit roster is genuinely broad — 30+ creatures each with four distinct abilities means the strategic space is real, not shallow. The asset pipeline is clean: spritesheets, SVG ability icons, and audio are all open-licensed (CC-BY-SA), so the project is legally forkable and remixable without clearing rights for every asset. Active commits as recently as June 2026 with 699 forks signals a real contributor community, not abandonware. The AGPL license means any hosted fork must ship source, which keeps derivative games honest.
No server-side validation is visible in the repo — game logic lives in the browser, which is a fundamental problem for a game billing itself as an eSport. Any determined player can cheat by modifying client state. The Phaser version in use is aging and the codebase has accumulated years of jQuery-era patterns that don't survive a TypeScript strict mode audit; contributor friction is real. There's no ranked matchmaking system or replay functionality, which are table-stakes for competitive play. Documentation for adding new units is scattered — the CONTRIBUTING.md points to GitHub marketing before it explains how to actually implement a new creature ability.