The Interface

Every panel, button and badge on screen, and what each one is for.

Almost the entire screen is map. Everything else sits around the edges and gets out of the way when you are not using it.

The game menu, session pill and date pill along the top; the toolbar bottom left; your flag and the advisor bottom right. Everything else is map.

The edges at a glance

On beta the bottom corners hold more. Bottom right, your flag opens the Country panel (on a phone, your country's name in the date pill does), the Advisor button opens the advisor alone, and under them is the map switch, Political or Diplomatic, with a legend (see map modes). Bottom left, while your troops are on a battlefield, a red War room button stands beside the toolbar (see the War Room).

Panels overlap in a fixed order, so opening the advisor never buries the thing you were reading, and the main menu always comes out on top. On a phone the whole interface fits the screen and the advisor drawer can be closed again like any other panel.

The map itself

Clicking things is the primary way you interact with the world.

• Click the map → a card for the country and the region under your cursor. The country row has 💬 to open a diplomatic chat, ⧉ to copy its name and ⓘ to open its panel; the region row names the region. Where the region is occupied or contested the card says who is sovereign, who controls it and who claims it, and where a group controls it, which group.
• The country panel → flag, details, alternative names, related events filtered by importance (All, Major, Minor), an Advisor Report — an AI intelligence reading — on request, and Open Diplomacy. On beta it also has Stats.
• Click a unit → an intelligence card describing the formation — what it is, whose it is, how strong, and what it appears to be doing.
• Click a city or structure → its name, population, and what it is.

On beta the region row's ⓘ opens the region's details — its cities and its neighbours.

Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. See the world map for what the colours, stripes and labels mean.

On beta the map also turns and tilts. With a mouse, drag with the right button: sideways turns the map, up and down tilts it, and the wheel still zooms. On a trackpad, click and drag to pan, and pinch or drag with two fingers to zoom; hold Shift while you drag with two fingers to turn and tilt the map, both at once. Shift with the arrow keys turns and tilts it too, and all of this works in the War Room as well.

The date pill and time

Top right, always visible: your country and the current in-game date.

• » opens the time skip panel — fixed jumps from six hours to a year, a custom amount, auto-jump, ↩ Undo last turn, and today's AI request count.
• « opens the Events panel — the events from the last jump, replayed one at a time, with the map animating as each lands, and ✋ Intervene here to stop the round where you want to act.

Full detail in time and turns.

The toolbar

Three buttons, bottom left.

Chat

Diplomacy. Two tabs:

• Diplomacy — every conversation you are part of. One-to-one threads with a country, or group threads with several. Countries open threads with you unprompted, and unread ones are badged.
• Spy — everyone else's conversations, as far as your intelligence service can read them. This is also where you deploy, recall, expel and turn agents.

On beta the panel is headed Diplomacy, with three tabs: Contacts (your conversations), Institutions (the bodies countries belong to) and Intelligence (your service), which has its own Overview, Countries, Operations and Reports. Intelligence is where your agents take their orders.

See diplomacy and espionage.

✦ Actions

Your order queue for the coming turn, under your standing goal. Write orders in plain English, press AI Suggestions for ideas or Brainstorm to talk them through with the advisor, refine a rough draft into a proper order, and delete anything you change your mind about. Only planned orders show, under Your Submitted Actions; they clear as the turn resolves them. On beta, Suggested Actions and Your Submitted Actions are two sections, and one is open at a time. See giving orders.

Projects & Operations

The board of long-running efforts — research programmes, construction, military and covert operations, campaigns — that span many turns. You do not add to it by hand: events, your agents and your advisor write it. See projects and operations.

On beta the board is a tab of the Actions panel: open ✦ Actions and choose Projects. Its old button in the toolbar opens Rostra, the social network (see diplomacy).

The advisor drawer

The Advisor button, bottom right, opens a drawer you can resize by dragging its left edge. It has two tabs.

Advisor — a chat with your own analyst. It reads the real game state and answers about it, in markdown, sometimes with charts. Ask it anything about your position.

Stats — the national stat sheet. Two sub-tabs, Diplomacy and Economy: relations, agreements and conflicts on one, the economy, strategic indices, stability, population and your intelligence rating on the other. It retargets to whatever country you last clicked, so it doubles as a way to read anyone.

On beta Stats has a panel of its own. The drawer is the advisor alone, and the stat sheet is the Country panel, opened by your flag or by Stats in any country's panel. It has four tabs — 🏛 Politics, 🤝 Diplomacy, 📈 Economy and 🏆 Ranking, which sets the countries side by side. While it is open, clicking a country on the map shows that one.

See the advisor and national statistics.

The game menu

☰, top left, opens the game menu, with four tabs:

• Game — the current campaign and Game Management: switch, duplicate, import or manage campaigns.
• Tools — Cheats, Events / Timeline and the AI debug console, one click away.
• Settings — four tiles, General, Map, AI and Advanced, each opening the full-screen settings workspace at that section. On beta there is a fifth, Sound.
• Help — the wiki, bug reporting, the privacy policy and the community links.

See the settings reference.

Search

The 🔍 button beside the toolbar finds places by name as you type and flies the camera to them. The game's own countries, cities and structures come first, under the names they have in your campaign, then real-world places from an OpenStreetMap search. It only moves the camera — it does not select or change anything. On beta it finds the world's groups and units too, and in an invented world it leaves real-world places out.

Cheats

☰ → Tools → Cheats is the game master's toolbox: the GM console, standing reminders every AI is told, the event editor, interactive events, the history document, rolling back turns, annexing territory, editing or creating countries, inspecting regions, the Force Manager, difficulty, switching which country you play, and map features — and on beta, groups and puppet states. See cheats and the GM console.

The main menu

The session pill's ⌂ Exit Game returns you to the library, which has three tabs:

• Games — your campaigns, by last played and most played.
• Scenarios — the worlds you can start new games on, plus Create Scenario.
• Community — the Community Hub.

On beta the menu is where the game starts. Nothing loads until you press Play on a game. The first time the game opens after an update, a vault door stands in front of the menu: click its wheel to open it, onto a notice of what the update brings when there is one. On a wide screen the pages sit on a rail down the left — Games, Scenarios, and Community — with Settings, for what applies to every game, at its foot; the Open Historia mark at the top opens the history of every update. Games has Continue Playing and All Games; Scenarios has Recently Used and the Scenario Library, with All, Yours, Community and Updates; what you delete waits at the foot of each, on its Recently deleted shelf.

If the screen is blank

A full-screen warning, WebGL Not Available, means the map cannot render. WebGL is sometimes refused for a moment — a laptop switching graphics, a driver reset, a wake from sleep — so the warning keeps checking for half a minute and reloads the game by itself if WebGL comes back; Reload tries again by hand. If it stays, on a desktop it usually means graphics drivers or a browser setting. See troubleshooting.

Next

• The world map — reading what you are looking at.
• Time and turns — the button that actually advances the game.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-10-25 · main 6e6239c4 · beta d7e8fa85. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.