I’ve just pushed the first public release of Turnwise – a platform for async, turn-based multiplayer games — live at turnwise.games. It’s a project I’ve been building under my Odd Little Games banner, and today marks the first time anyone outside my own testing has been able to touch it.
Why async, turn-based games?
Most multiplayer games ask for a chunk of your evening: everyone online, everyone free, everyone ready at the same time. That’s a lot to coordinate. Turnwise is built around a different rhythm — you make a move when you have a spare minute, your opponent replies when they have theirs, and the game just… continues. No scheduling, no lobbies, no pressure to finish tonight.
Under the hood, that simplicity took a fair amount of engineering. Turnwise runs on a shared engine with a driver-based architecture, meaning each game (Connect 4, and more to come) plugs into the same core rules for turns, moves, and results, while the game-specific logic — win conditions, valid moves — stays isolated and simple. It’s a foundation designed to grow into many different games over time, not just the ones live today.
This is a beta — genuinely
I want to be clear about where things stand: this is a first release, and it’s an early beta. A few things to expect going in:
- The game library is small on purpose. I’d rather launch a couple of games that work properly than a dozen that don’t.
- You will find rough edges. Some flows are unpolished, some features are still missing entirely.
- Things may change. As real players use the platform, I expect the spec and the UI to keep evolving.
I care more about getting the core mechanics right — reliable move handling, fair ratings, no ambiguity about game state — than about shipping a flashy front end fast. That foundation is what’s live now. Everything else builds on top of it from here.
Try it, and tell me what breaks
If you want to kick the tires: head to turnwise.games, register an account, and play a few games. If something’s confusing, broken, or missing entirely — I want to hear about it. Early feedback right now is worth more than it will be in six months, once patterns are harder to change.
Thanks for reading, and for following along with this project as it’s come together. There’s a lot more to come.
