Most remakes of old games modernize away the thing you loved. Space Trader keeps it: the same buy-low-sell-high hustle, the same pirates on your tail, the same little galaxy that once lived on a Palm Pilot — now living in a single web page. Dock, trade, jump, survive, and retire rich enough for the moon.
Why We Built It
Twenty-some years ago this game lived in a shirt pocket, played in stylus-sized sessions while standing in line. We missed it — not a museum copy of it, but the feel of it: quick decisions, real risk, a run that ends with a score worth bragging about. So we rebuilt it faithfully for the web, and used the project as a proving ground for how we build now — the entire thing planned, executed, and reviewed by the newest AI models working through n-dx, our own agent toolkit. One half nostalgia, one half laboratory. Both halves shipped.
A Galaxy That Fits in One File
You start as a new commander with a small ship, a thousand credits, and a debt-free future nobody expects you to keep. A hundred and twenty solar systems sit within jump range of ambition: each with its own government, tech level, and prices that move with events. Buy water where it's cheap, sell firearms where it's legal, and decide how much cargo you're willing to lose to the next pirate who doesn't like your answer.
Trade. Jump. Repeat. Retire before the galaxy collects.
Buy low, sell high, stay sharp
Ten goods, live price events, and markets shaped by politics — a war zone pays for firearms, a plague pays for medicine, and a boring agricultural backwater pays for almost nothing. The trading game rewards attention, not grinding: every route you discover is one the galaxy was already hinting at.
Encounters at every jump
Pirates want your cargo, police want to inspect it, and traders occasionally want to make you an offer mid-flight. Fight, flee, bribe, or surrender — your reputation follows you either way. When a fight goes truly wrong, an escape pod is the difference between a setback and a headstone.
Wormholes and strange days
Three wormhole pairs offer instant passage across the map for a toll, bending every route calculation around them. And the galaxy has moods: special events and quest chains surface as you play, the same way they did on the original — quietly, and usually at the worst possible time.
Five difficulties, one scoreboard
From Beginner to Impossible, the game scales the danger, not the rules. Every run ends in a score built from net worth, days survived, difficulty, and kills — and a decision about when you're wealthy enough to stop pushing your luck.
Yours anywhere, signed in or not
The whole game ships as one self-contained HTML file: it plays in any browser, saves locally, and works with no connection at all. Sign in with your En Dash account and your progress is ready for cloud saves and an En Dash-wide retirement leaderboard — but signing in is always optional. The game never puts the fun behind a login.
Faithful by Design
Space Trader follows the same principle as the rest of the En Dash toolkit: better systems do not always need to be bigger systems. There are no microtransactions, no energy timers, no engagement mechanics the original never had — and no framework underneath, either. The game is dependency-free vanilla JavaScript in a single file, its interface a first-class recreation of the Palm OS original, and every build has to survive a gauntlet of automated balance and invariant checks that play thousands of trips headlessly before a human ever loads the page.
Who It's For
Space Trader is for anyone who remembers a gray plastic rectangle fondly, and for anyone who never met one but likes strategy in five-minute sips. It's at home in a browser tab between meetings, on a phone in a waiting room, and anywhere "one more jump" is the real question. And if you're curious what it looks like when AI agents build and operate a real product end to end — this is one, and it's live at spacetrader.endash.us (opens in a new tab).