Naked War

Naked War is a strategic turn-based battle game for two players, played over email. Both players take the role of military officers controlling a squad of four soldiers and battle each other for supremacy on an island arena. Soldiers can drive tanks, fly helicopters, ride boats, or just shoot each other.

The game is played in turns: A player issues orders to his soldiers then hits the 'send' button to send that turn to his opponent, before watching the results on his PC. The opposing player receives the turn as an attachment to an email in his inbox. Running the turn file launches the game and plays the first player's turn then allows the opponent to reply by issuing orders to his soldiers.

Each turn takes just three to five minutes to play, and games can be played at any pace. The game uses a proprietary 3D engine called Scaffold which allows completely deformable and destructible environments, yet only uses a fraction of the data of a typical 3D video game world, and comes with an integrated Map Editor so players can create their own islands. The 3D data is just 2 or 3 Kbytes so that complete island maps can be included with every turn file. These turn files are small enough to be sent over any email system, yet contain within them complete, dynamic 3D environments, scalable to work well on both low spec office PCs and high spec gaming PCs. Players can use their own hand-made islands, created with the Map Editor, when Challenging their friends.

The game client software is completely free to download and install, and free to play locally on one PC, and free for the opponent in a two player game. Only the player who starts a new game - by issuing a Challenge - pays a fee. Registration is free, and every new player who registers gets one Challenge Credit, free. Challenges can be sent to anyone in the world with an email address. Players buy subscriptions of 20 or more Challenge Credits, allowing them to start at least 20 new games. Games take around an hour to play.

The developers describe it as a Community Messaging Game. Once you register you get an Officer Stats page on the Zee-3 website, and access to an existing community of Naked War players. There's an ongoing war between the red team and the blue team, Player Ranking tables, prizes for the best players each month, and Community Games.

In 2011 the game was made completely free as a download.