Raft Wars, Raft Wars 2 and Raft Wars Multiplayer: Which One to Play

Raft Wars (2007)

Martijn Kunst made the first Raft Wars in Flash and it spread across every game portal of the late 2000s on the strength of one idea: a toddler with a chest of treasure, two people on a raft, one shot each. Ten levels, three weapons, a shop between fights and a comic strip between levels. When browsers stopped running Flash, his studio TinyDobbins rebuilt it in HTML5, and that rebuild is what plays on this site. It is the same game with touch controls and ten languages, and it is still the best place to start, because everything the later games do is built on this shot.

Raft Wars 2

The sequel moves the fight to a water park that has been built over the treasure. Simon and his brother are older, the enemies are lifeguards, park staff and whoever else works there, and the levels use the park's slides and pools as terrain, so shots ricochet and bounce in ways the open sea never allowed. The aiming is the same drag, the shop is bigger, and the difficulty ramps faster; play it once the first game's tenth level stops being hard. It is on the games page here as an HTML5 build.

Raft Wars Multiplayer

The third game is not a sequel so much as a rebuild for the internet: you build a raft and a crew, upgrade both, and fight other players in real time, one turn each, for coins and a place on the ladder. It needs a connection to the game's own servers, and it is the one to play when you want an opponent who learns. Its intro comic retells the first game's story, which is a fair hint about where to begin if you have never played any of them.

Which one first

The first game, here on the home page, for the mechanics; the second for harder levels on the same skills; Multiplayer when a computer opponent is no longer a challenge. All three are on raftwars.org and none of them installs anything.