A free 60-second naval arcade game built around the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. Two navies. Twelve missions. Real history, fictionalized for play.
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 into a formal traffic separation scheme: two nautical miles inbound, two nautical miles outbound, and a two-mile separation zone between them. Before the 2026 crisis scenario used by the game, EIA data showed about 21.6 million barrels per day of petroleum liquids moving through Hormuz in late 2025. In the in-game 2026 crisis layer, that flow has fallen sharply, which is why every tanker in the arcade matters.
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 Unity, no Unreal, and no download gate. The goal is a fast browser game that still has enough authored worldbuilding, mission text, and historical context to be worth reading when you are not playing.
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, and the 2022 drone attack on 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.
Strait Command is not live tracking, not military analysis, and not navigational guidance. It is a fictional game built around public information: EIA and IEA energy data, the Strait of Hormuz traffic separation scheme, Natural Earth coastline data, Sentinel-2 imagery, and open reporting on incidents such as Operation Praying Mantis, Stena Impero, Iran Air Flight 655, and Pacific Zircon.
The game uses reality as texture and constraint, then compresses time, range, sensors, damage, and command decisions so a round can resolve in sixty seconds. The source page lists the main references and separates current data from campaign fiction. Read the source notes →