A free 60-second naval arcade game built around the Strait of Hormuz — the 21-mile-wide piece of water through which 20% of the world's oil moves every day. Two navies. Twelve missions. Real history.
The Strait of Hormuz is the most consequential narrow water on Earth. Between Iran's southern coast and Oman's Musandam peninsula, the shipping lanes pinch to a width measured in seconds of helicopter flight time. Roughly a fifth of global crude oil and a third of seaborne LNG transits through it daily. Shut it for a week and Brent crude doubles. Shut it for a month and the global economy reorders itself.
The two navies that face each other across that water are the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) — fast boats, coastal missiles, drone swarms, the doctrine of asymmetric area denial — and the US Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain, built around a Nimitz-class carrier strike group, Burke-class destroyers, and the quiet assumption that the lane stays open.
Strait Command is a game about that water.
The arcade mode is a sixty-second score chase. The daily mode is one scenario per UTC day, identical worldwide — Wordle for naval operators. The story mode is the reason this exists: a twelve-mission narrative campaign called Mosquito Fleet, told from the inside of an IRGC fast boat.
Because the strait is for everybody. The story we wanted to tell — about a 26-year-old captain and his 47-year-old XO and the cousin who posts to TikTok — doesn't deserve to live behind a $30 download wall or a Steam page or a 4GB install. Open a tab. Pick a side. Sixty seconds.
Built on vanilla JavaScript and a single canvas element, with esbuild for bundling, Howler for audio, and a Cloudflare worker for the leaderboard. No React, no Unity, no Unreal. The whole game ships in less than the size of one stock photo.
Mosquito Fleet follows Captain Reza Tahami, IRGCN, from his first patrol off Abu Musa to a final decision in the strait. Petty Officer Yusef Karami — 47, lost his father in the 1988 Praying Mantis engagement — rides shotgun and tells the stories. Hossein Tahami, Reza's cousin, posts everything to social media and may or may not survive.
"My father said the same thing once. About a Liberian tanker. 1986."
"Did you let it pass that time too?"
"Of course. What else." — Yusef Karami · Mission 2 · The Stena Shadow
The missions are anchored in real events from the strait's history — the 1988 Tanker War, the 2019 seizure of the M/T Stena Impero, the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking that gave us the Bainbridge intercept, the 2022 attempted seizure of the M/T Pacific Zircon. Names changed, beats preserved.
▶ Browse all twelve missions →
The campaign portrays both sides with weight. The captain is Iranian. The XO is Iranian. The launch crews are Iranian. The decisions you make — to board or shadow, to fire or yield, to obey or refuse — have consequences that the script does not pre-judge. Both endings of Mission 12 are valid. The game does not tell you which side was right.
That is the player's call.
One developer. Built solo over two weeks of focused work. Art assets generated with the latest AI image models, processed and hand-tuned for the top-down naval aesthetic. Every line of code, every mission script, every UI flourish written by a single pair of hands.
Built by @StackCurious. If you make it past Mission 8, send a screenshot.