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Watch trailer on Steam ↗WinBolo
John Morrison · Published by John Morrison · Official site ↗
Positive — 83% positive (18 reviews) · 41 achievements
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
A multiplayer top-down tank game for up to 16 players. Capture bases and pillboxes, harvest trees, build roads and walls, lay mines, and battle for control of the island. The Macintosh classic, rebuilt for modern platforms — free, open source, and cross-platform across desktop, mobile, and web.
Action, Indie, Free To Play, Strategy · 2026 · More free games
About this game
An instant to learn. A lifetime to master. You have to play it to understand.
WinBolo is a multiplayer top-down tank game for up to 16 players. Pilot your tank across the island, capture bases and pillboxes, fortify your position, and battle for control of the map.
Two play styles, one battlefield
Drop into a freeform game where alliances shift hour by hour and a well-timed betrayal is a perfectly respectable move. Or run it tournament-style: teams locked in before the match, no diplomacy, two sides fighting for the island until one holds every base.
Both share the same simple rules and the same surprising depth.
Capture. Build. Win.
Bases are your lifeline — the only place to refuel, rearm, and repair your tank. Pillboxes hold key terrain and rip through anyone foolish enough to cross open ground; capture them, reposition them, turn them on their former owners. Harvest trees to fuel your build orders. Lay down roads to move faster than your enemies. Wall off chokepoints. Mine the approaches.
The world is dynamic Detonated mines leaves a crater. Craters fill with water. Water becomes rivers, rivers reshape the lines of attack, and the battlefield you started on isn't the one you're fighting on an hour later. Trees slowly regrow. Use too many of them and risk being deforested and unable to repair your pillboxes
A 1987 classic, rebuilt
Bolo was created by Stuart Cheshire in 1987 and became one of the defining multiplayer games of the early Macintosh era. In 1998, John Morrison began developing WinBolo — a faithful Windows reimplementation, and the only Bolo port Cheshire ever officially endorsed. Through a decade of active development, WinBolo grew a Linux port, a thriving online community at , and a player base that ran tournaments, shared maps, and shared strategies in the forums.
WinBolo 2.0 carries that work forward — same gameplay you remember, modernized for today's platforms.
What's new in 2.0
Cross-platform play — Windows, Mac, Linux, Steam Deck, iOS, Android, and the web, all on the same servers
Modern netcode — authoritative server, lag compensation with position-history rewind, client-side prediction, adaptive jitter buffer. Shells hit where you aimed.
Easy self-hosting — UPnP and NAT-PMP open ports automatically; UDP hole punching reaches servers behind most home routers
Built-in map editor — pencil, fill, magic wand, mazes, four procedural generators (Tournament, Natural, Maze, Fractal), text-as-terrain, image import, full symmetry tools, and a stamp library
A new AI Brain — GoalHunter uses goal priorities, threat trajectories, and territory influence maps. Brains are written in Lua. Train your own with the machine learning tools and export them as in-game opponents. Tools provide to help build them as well.
17 languages including in-game chat and player names
Embedded replay viewer with WBN integration — review games, leave rankings, watch other people's matches without leaving the client
Free, open source, and built to last
Bolo was shareware. WinBolo carried that spirit forward. WinBolo 2.0 keeps it going — freely available on Steam, the App Store, and Google Play, with an optional supporter purchase for anyone who wants to help fund development (including, perhaps, the players who never quite got around to sending in their shareware fee back in 2001!)
The full source code will be on GitHub shortly after launch under GPL v2, continuing with when WinBolo first went open source in 2008.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
- Processor: Any x86-64 CPU with SSE2
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: Any GPU with a working WDDM driver
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 200 MB available space
- Additional Notes: x64 only — ARM64 runs via emulation. No VC++ Redist install required.
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
- Processor: Quad-core 2 GHz or better
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Any GPU from the last decade
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 500 MB available space
- Additional Notes: x64 only — ARM64 runs via emulation. No VC++ Redist install required
Supported Languages
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
WinBolo 2.03 - Ingame replays, Web Client Available
Post-game replay, recap and awards After finishing a game, the lobby now shows a replay of the game just played to all players. If the server is using WinBolo.net, the log file is downloaded via it; otherwise the server sends the log file to all clients, controllable via the -servelog command line option / in-game hosting setting. The replay window can be resized, zoomed and scrolled, including trackpad pinch-to-zoom on macOS. Animated GIFs can be generated and saved of selected gameplay areas. Timestamps can be copied into chat for post-game discussion; clicking a timestamp in chat jumps the replay to that moment. Logging must be enabled on the server; replays always show in single-player games. Clicking on a player in the lobby list will centre the replay on the selected player. A post-game scoreboard is shown, including kills, deaths, base/pillbox captures, and builder deaths and kills. Awards are handed out to players. In-game highlights are automatically calculated and displayed. This is a work-in-progress feature and may contain issues or not pick the best highlights. WinBolo.net integration to rate the game's log file and comment online. Web client A new web-based client is now available in beta. You can play via https://bolo.io and https://play.winbolo.net — you must be logged in to play a networked game. Network games are fully compatible with the desktop version. Log viewer The log viewer can now hide the time spent in the lobby before the game begins. Turned on by default. Highlight selections and awards are shown at the top of the event log. Highlights can be clicked to jump to the relevant part of the log. Fixes players joining mid-game not being named correctly. Gameplay As requested by the community, tank wall slide now uses WinBolo 1.17 behaviour: an oblique wall hit keeps only the along-wall component of movement, so tanks slow down at walls instead of redirecting at full speed. When repairing a pillbox, the builder now leaves the tank with the full...Read full article on Community Announcements (john)Patch NotesOfficial
WinBolo 2.02c Released
UI changes: When a game returns to the lobby as all bases are controlled by one team (and option enabled) now displays a newswire and no longer displays a return to lobby vote passed popup. Winners are now always announced in the lobby. Surrender vote announcements are now private. The newswire only announces vote commenced/failed to the team voting, not everyone in the game. Ping displayed in the players menu is now smoothed and no longer updates multiple times a second. Bugfixes: Fixes a dedicated server crash that could occur when a player is disconnected for continual high ping. Fixes a startup crash when launching with non-English language due to out of date translation files. Fixes a macOS SIGBUS crash using luaJIT to run multiple AI brains. Fixed an issue where a builder dying from a tank explosion may parachute to the wrong location. New features coming in the next release!Read full article on Community Announcements (john)Patch NotesOfficial
2.02b - mac only patch
Fixes a crash on Apple Silicon Macs that could occur using AI tanks, caused by a bug in how the Lua JIT compiler manages executable memory across threads.Read full article on Community Announcements (john)Patch NotesOfficial
macOS Only patch
macOS only patch to fix crashes on startup on languages other then English due to new localizations added in 2.02bRead full article on Community Announcements (john)Patch NotesOfficial
Changes in 2.02b
Changes in 2.02b Improved lua brain performance by approximately 20% by migrating to use LuaJIT. Note: Supported lua version has been changed from 5.4 to 5.1 as that is what luajit currently supports. New settings tab for hosting games from the client. Allows setting server port, spectators, log file saving, and map uploading support. Addition GoalHunter 1.6 fixesRead full article on Community Announcements (john)
