Thousand Suns

Thousand Suns is a 5-minute galactic conquest battle where you and four AI rivals race from a single home planet to control an entire galaxy. Build up your production, out-tech your rivals, and send your fleets across the stars: every match compresses an empire-building war into the time it takes to grab a coffee.

How to Play Thousand Suns

You start with one planet and one goal: expand before someone else does. Your homeworld constantly builds ships on its own, and you send that growing fleet outward to claim neutral worlds or crush enemy territory. Every planet you take adds more production, more options, and more pressure on the four bots also racing to dominate the galaxy.

Growing Your Empire

Planets level up automatically over time, and every level-up hands you a choice between three upgrade paths:

Industry — produce ships faster

Agriculture — level up faster, though growth slows the higher a planet climbs and the bigger your empire gets

Research — raise your tech level, extending your fleets' range and boosting their combat power against enemy fleets

There's no single best path: a battle-hungry empire leaning on Industry and Research plays very differently from an expansionist one stacking Agriculture across dozens of worlds.

The Galaxy Escalates

No two matches look the same. Each game rolls a different mix of galactic features into play, so you'll need to adapt your strategy round to round:

Specialized planets — dedicated Industry, Agriculture, or Research worlds that double the value of the matching upgrade

Asteroid Fields — unclaimed and dangerous. Holding one slowly drains your fleet unless your civilization is built to exploit them

Starbases — capturable strongholds that fire on enemy ships in range, upgradeable for more range, faster-firing lasers, or quicker future level-ups

Ferries — draw a supply line between two of your planets so newly built ships automatically reinforce your front line instead of idling at home

Command Your Fleet

Select a planet in range and send ships to a neutral world to claim it, or to an enemy world to fight for it. Win the fight and the planet, and its production, is yours; lose it and your fleet is gone. Your tech level determines both how far your ships can strike and how hard they hit, so racing up the tech ladder is as much a weapon as a shield.

Play as one of over 20 collectible civilizations, each with a unique galaxy-spanning ability: from fleets that outrange everyone else, to empires that start with a head start in ships, tech, or territory. You always start at a single planet, but which civilization you bring changes how that first spark of expansion plays out.

The clock is always running. With five minutes on the board, every choice compounds: and in the final 30 seconds, all fleets get a speed boost, turning the endgame into a mad scramble to lock in your rank before time runs out. Conquer the whole galaxy and you win outright; otherwise, whoever controls the most territory when the clock hits zero comes out on top.