🕊️ Landship WW1

Drive one of the first tanks ever built

Landship WW1 puts you at the controls of one of the very first tanks, the strange rhomboid machines of the First World War that their inventors called landships. Your job is not to fight: it is to get across. Between the two front lines lies no-man's-land, a wasteland of trenches, shell craters, barbed wire and deep, sticky mud, and the first tanks were built precisely to cross it. In twelve crossings you will learn why they looked the way they did, and why driving one was so hard.

The game is played side-on in the web browser, with no download. There are no enemies and no people anywhere: the only thing trying to stop you is the ground itself, and an engine that does not always do what it is told.

Why was the tank invented?

In 1914 the war on the Western Front got stuck. Both sides dug long lines of trenches protected by barbed wire, and soldiers could not cross the ground between them. Engineers looked for a machine that could roll over the wire, cross the trenches and keep going through the mud. In 1915 Britain set up the Landships Committee, at first organised by the Navy, to build one. The first prototype, Little Willie, could not cross wide trenches. The next design, nicknamed Mother, had the famous rhomboid shape with the tracks running all the way round a long hull, and it worked. To keep it secret, workers were told they were building water carriers, and the code word 'tank' stuck.

The first tanks, the Mark I, went into battle on 15 September 1916 at Flers–Courcelette during the Battle of the Somme in France. They were slow, hot and unreliable, but they could do what nothing else could, and within two years hundreds of tanks were crossing the battlefields.

How the landship moves

The landship in the game behaves like the real thing. It is long and rigid, about ten metres from end to end, so it rests on the ground like a plank. That is the whole point of the shape: a narrow trench is shorter than the tank, so the tank simply bridges it and rolls on. A wide trench is a different story. Drive into one and the nose tips down until it hits the far wall, which is too high to climb. Then you need a fascine, a huge bundle of brushwood carried on the roof. Press F and it drops into the trench in front of you and fills it, exactly as tanks did at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917.

The landship has two gears. High gear is quicker on flat ground but does not have the strength to climb a steep crater wall or push through mud. Low gear is slow but strong. Use high gear on the flat and change down before every crater and every mud patch.

Mud, heat and breakdowns

The mud of no-man's-land was so deep that tanks could sink in it. Drive slowly through a mud patch in high gear and the mud meter fills up until the landship is bogged down. When that happens, press U for the unditching beam, a heavy wooden beam carried on rails on the roof, which the crew could chain to the tracks so the tank dragged itself out. Each crossing gives you two.

Early tank engines were weak and overheated easily, and the crew had to stop to fix them. In the game, low gear works the engine hard and the heat gauge climbs; let it reach the top and the engine boils over. Some crossings also have a breakdown on the way. Either way, a repair panel shows four arrows: press them in order to get the engine running again.

Carrier pigeons and stars

WW1 tanks had no radios, so they carried carrier pigeons in baskets. To send a message back, the crew tied it to a pigeon's leg and let it fly home. Every crossing has three pigeon baskets to pick up on the way. Reach the flag for one star, beat the par time for two, and bring all three pigeon baskets for three. There are 36 stars in all; Autumn Mud opens at 8 stars and Winter Frost at 18.

Twelve history cards

After every crossing you get a history card, twelve in all, that together tell the story of the first tanks: the Landships Committee, the secret code name, Little Willie and Mother, the first tank battle, life for the crew of eight inside a Mark I, its walking-pace top speed, the four crew members it took to steer one, carrier pigeons, the unditching beam, fascines at Cambrai, the Mark V that one driver could steer, and how the ideas of 1916 are still used in tanks today. It is a short history of the invention of the tank, one crossing at a time.

Controls

On a computer: the right arrow or D drives forwards, the left arrow or A backs up, the up arrow selects high gear and the down arrow low gear, F drops a fascine, U uses the unditching beam and P pauses. When the engine needs fixing, press the arrow keys shown. On phones and tablets, big buttons under the game do everything, including the repair arrows.

Free, safe and made for kids

Landship WW1 is free to play, with no download, no sign-up and nothing to buy. There is no chat, nobody else online, no enemies and no people in the game. Progress is saved only on your own device. See the Parents & Safety page for more.

More tank games

See the tanks that came after in WW2 Tank Battles 3D, which has a Tank Museum of real historic tanks, or drive a modern tank in Military Tank Simulator 3D. Every tank game is on the Tank Games page.

Frequently asked questions