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Dune 2026 — I raised a shield, and a sandworm came for me

Turn-based artillery on Arrakis. Inspired by Frank Herbert's 🌕Dune and 🪱Worms (game). Free, in your browser, no install.
2–4 players on one phone. Any platform with browser. Phone, tablet, PC... Try on Smart TV!
https://hexstack-app.itch.io/dune2026

In Dune, a shield in open desert is a death sentence — the field drives a worm into a killing frenzy. The Fremen don't use them on the sand.

So here, the Holtzman shield soaks 60% of your health, and every worm within a third of the map turns toward you.

Not a cutscene. It flips course, swims harder, and arrives in a long arc you can watch crossing the dunes. It gives up after five seconds. You can shoot your way out — if you're quick, and if the wind lets you.

Every good option in this game costs you something.

🎲 Your turn. Their turn. One phone on the table.

A board game that happens to have ballistics.

You take your shot, hand the phone over, and watch their face while they do the maths on your position. No timers anywhere — not one. Take five minutes on the dial. Argue about the wind. Change your mind twice.

The old ones understood this — Worms, Scorched Earth, Pocket Tanks. Tension from commitment, not reflexes. Turn-based is what lets four people share one screen and stay in the conversation instead of hunching over it.

No accounts. No lobby. No netcode. Nobody rage-quitting from another continent.

🎯 The duel

Angle, power, wind. The wind changes every turn, so last round's perfect shot drifts wide. Your shell digs a real crater out of the dune you were hiding behind — and the ground you're standing on is the ground you're destroying.

Two direct hits kill. Miss by 15 units → three. By 30 → four. By 45 → seven. Past 60 you achieved nothing but landscaping. Near-misses count.

SHORT · LONG (30% damage, grinding sieges) · SIMPLE (no specials, pure trajectory) · 🚩 TOURNAMENT (twelve rounds, scores carried)

Ten line-ups — any mix of humans and bots, so empty seats aren't a problem. The bots don't cheat: difficulty is aiming error, not a different algorithm. Same physics, same wind, same weapons. A harder bot just misses by less.

🏰Four Houses

🔴 HARKONNEN · 🔵 ATREIDES · 🟢 ORDOS · 🟣 EMPEROR

Harkonnen red and Atreides blue because Herbert says so. Ordos green because Westwood invented them for Dune II. Corrino purple turns up when everyone else is done. Hand-traced crests, canon colours, and your House rotates between rounds so nobody's stuck in red all night.

☄️Eight special attacks

One use each per round. Never on turn one — nobody opens with a haymaker.

• 🛡️ HOLTZMAN SHIELD — soaks 60%, and calls the worms. No regen.
• 🛰️ ORBITAL LASER — 5% damage. The only thing that strips a shield, and it cuts through ground.
• ☢️ ATOMIC SHELL — biggest blow in the game, with ±30% aiming error. Terrifying to fire.
• 🔊 SONIC CANNON — ignores terrain and hits everyone it crosses. Cover won't save them.
• ✈️ ORNITHOPTER STRIKE — three bombs on a mark, and the wind drags them. Can hit you.
• 🥷 SABOTAGE — 20% off a random enemy. Guaranteed damage, zero control.
• 📡 RADAR SWEEP — aim guide 2.2× for two turns. The only one that doesn't end your turn.
• 🛠️ FIELD REPAIR — a carryall patches 30%.

The laser fires from a Spacing Guild satellite you can see station-keeping in the sky. It barely scratches a hull — but it's the only answer to a raised shield. So: shield up and you're safe from shells, visible to worms, and naked to one specific beam.

🪱 Arrakis runs whether you're playing or not

Worms make spice. Harvesters come for the spice. A shallow worm pushes melange to the surface, a harvester crawls out to work it, a carryall lifts it off-map when it's full. Nobody asked for this. It has zero gameplay effect.

Worms stay inside the sand crust and never enter rock. One passes under your launcher and the screen shakes — only for the player whose turn it is, because a tremor is something YOU feel. When one runs shallow, static builds and you get Coriolis lightning: rare, an omen you glance up at, not a strobe you learn to ignore.

Sandstorms roll through. Ornithopters cross the sky. Two moons — and on the big one, a desert mouse. If you know why there's a mouse on the second moon of Arrakis, you know exactly what it's doing there.

Harvester traced from the Dune II "Spice Collection" still, palette sampled from the 1992 sprites — those oranges are not an accident. All audio is synthesised live in the browser, no sound files, which is period-correct: 1992 hardware synthesised too, and filtered noise plus oscillators are that texture.

📽️ And a mode where you don't play at all

CONTEMPLATION MODE — four bots, the sharpest aim in the game, round after round, forever. Nothing is scored: there's no series to win when nobody's playing.

A lava lamp that occasionally nukes itself. Put it on a second screen.

No ads. No install. No account. One 602 KB page, zero external requests. Hand-built engine, verified against the closed-form projectile equations — 45° maximises range, and left/right shots mirror exactly, because a duel that isn't symmetric isn't a duel.

Free. Ninety seconds to your first shot.

Raise a shield. Watch the sand. Then tell me whether the worm got you — I want to know if five seconds of interest is too merciful.

https://hexstack-app.itch.io/dune2026