11 September 2026

Games like OGame in 2026

People searching this usually want one of three things. Some have bounced off OGame because a universe that has been running for fifteen years belongs to the people who got there first. Some still like it and want a second game to run alongside. And some are coming back after a decade and want to know what is still alive.

This page is the honest version. Every game below was checked in September 2026, and where we could not confirm something we say so instead of guessing. There is a section on our own game at the end, clearly marked, and it is last for a reason.

What is still running, checked September 2026

That last row matters more than it looks. These games get recommended constantly in threads that are themselves five years old, and a recommendation is not a pulse. If you are about to invest a month in one of them, open it and look for a dated post before you do.

The three questions that actually decide it

Genre labels will not help you here. These do.

Does it run in rounds, or forever? A persistent universe compounds. Someone who started in 2009 has a fifteen year head start that no amount of clever play closes, which is the single most common reason people leave OGame rather than a complaint about its design. A round-based game resets everyone to zero every few weeks or months. Planetarion has worked this way since 2000. OGame and Astro Empires have not.

Does it still require a fleetsave? In the older games, a fleet sitting at home when an attack lands is destroyed, and a fleet in transit is not. So the defensive play is to send your whole army somewhere pointless, timed to return after the danger has passed. The consequence is alarms at 4am, and that one mechanic has probably driven more people out of this genre than anything else. It is not a law of nature. It is a design choice, and games can and do decide otherwise. If you want the full explanation, we wrote one in what is an MMORTS.

Is it usable on a phone? Most of this genre was built for a desktop browser around 2004 and it shows. Which is strange, because a game that updates on a heartbeat and needs a few minutes of judgement three times a day is a better fit for a phone than it ever was for a desktop.

A note on the "alternatives" pages you will find

Gameforge, who publish OGame, run their own pages targeting these exact searches. As of September 2026 they have one page listing OGame alternatives as Ikariam, Travian, Tribal Wars, Forge of Empires and Neptune's Pride, and a second page listing games like OGame as Neptune's Pride, Hades' Star, Astro Empires and Ikariam. The two lists disagree with each other, and three of the five games on the first one are Gameforge's own.

This is worth knowing because it tells you what most of the results for this search are. The incumbent is defending the query space, and most of what is left is a listicle of seventeen games where several have nothing in common with OGame beyond being set in space. One of the same pages states plainly that OGame "still has no real browser competition that combines all its core mechanics." We think that is close to true, and it is a strange thing for a publisher to say about a genre it leads.

Where Galaro fits, and where it does not

Galaro is our game, so treat this section accordingly.

It is round-based. An eon runs about a month, and then everything resets and everybody starts level. It ticks every half hour. There is no fleetsave: instead you set a Night Shield over the hours you are asleep, which protects roughly three quarters of the asteroids a raider could otherwise take, and it needs lead time so you cannot drop it reactively when a fleet appears on radar. It was built for a phone first. It is free and there is currently nothing to buy.

Since we run it, we can tell you things about it that nobody can tell you about the others. Across the 91 player versus player battles fought in eon 5 up to 11 September 2026, the attacker won 63.7% of them, and the average haul was a third of an asteroid. Attacking is worth doing and it is not free. That is a small sample from a young game and we would rather give you the number with its sample size than a slogan.

The honest case against it: it is new, so the population is small, and it does not have twenty years of accumulated tools, wikis and alliance politics behind it the way OGame does. If what you love about OGame is the depth of a world that thousands of people have been arguing about since 2002, we do not have that yet and we will not pretend otherwise.

So which one

• You want the classic, with everything built around it. Stay with OGame, or start on a newer universe rather than an old one.
• You want a real ending, and to start level with everyone. Planetarion, or Galaro.
• You want the classic feel with a smaller crowd. Astro Empires, which is genuinely still going at twenty years old.
• You want it on a phone and you want to stop setting alarms. Hades' Star if you want something purely mobile, Galaro if you want the browser 4X shape with the 4am problem removed.
• You want the economics rather than the war. Prosperous Universe, with the caveat that it is small.

If you want to see how the tick, the combat maths and the asteroid economy actually work before committing to anything, our guide lays it out, and the rest of the articles go through the genre properly.