A familiar trading game. A new browser edition.

What is Play Dope Wars?

This is the game at playdopewars.com: a solo, turn-based trading game with retro pixel art and a CRT-style interface. Classic starts with $2,000 cash, $5,000 debt, and 100 inventory spaces. Each trip changes the market and advances the clock.

Classic is free to play without signing up. Your run saves in the same browser; it does not sync across devices. Completed Classic runs support optional nickname posting to the leaderboard. Score validation replays submitted actions on the server, but cannot guarantee freedom from all abuse.

Pro costs $7.99 USD once and adds 30-, 45-, and 60-day campaigns, labs, assets, weapons, and international destinations that unlock during play. A Pro account is required to use that upgrade.

Drug Wars and Dope Wars are a family of editions

There is no single rulebook shared by every game with these names. The separate Unix/Windows dopewars project identifies itself as a rewrite of John E. Dell’s Drug Wars and documents features such as multiplayer and configurable rules. Those settings do not describe this browser remake.

The calculator game: TI-82, TI-83 and TI-83 Plus

If you remember Drug Wars on a graphing calculator, you may be looking for a calculator program rather than a web game. A 2002 TI-BASIC mailing-list discussion about TI-83 Drug Wars records the name in that community. Different calculator programs can have different prices, time limits, and rules.

This site runs in a browser. It does not provide a TI-83 download or emulate a calculator. It offers the same kind of buy-low, sell-high decisions in a new interface.

The Palm handheld version

In a 2006 interview with Ars Technica, Matt Lee described writing DopeWars for Palm as a way to learn handheld programming, drawing on the DOS game. He also distinguished his work from a separate Windows version.

Play Dope Wars is independent of those projects. It is not their official continuation, and it does not offer a Palm application download.

Playing on Android or iPhone

Open playdopewars.com in a modern browser and start Classic. There is no app-store installation. Keep using the same browser to resume a saved run; clearing site data or using a private session can remove the save.