Open Historia

Saves, Rollback and Sharing

How campaigns are stored, how to undo, how to clone, and how to move a game or scenario between machines.

Open Historia saves continuously. There is no save button, and there is no way to lose an hour of play to a crash.

The games library The Games tab. Each card carries its country, date and round; Current opens it, and its ⋮ holds Edit, Clone and Export.

Games and scenarios

Two different things, and the distinction matters:

One scenario seeds as many games as you like. Editing a scenario later does not rewrite the games already running on it — each keeps its own world, from who owns what to its events — but a game draws its regions from its scenario's map, so a border you reshape in the map editor shows in that scenario's games too.

That is also why, when an update replaces the built-in Modern Day scenario's map, the campaigns begun on the old map are not moved onto the new one: they go with the old map into a scenario of their own, Modern Day (classic map), and carry on there. An update that only refreshes the built-in scenario's content on the same map leaves your campaigns where they are — unless you had edited the built-in scenario yourself, in which case your edited copy and the campaigns on it are kept as Modern Day (your edited copy).

Autosave

Every time skip writes the whole campaign — world state, game state, events, your order queue, chat history and the colour palette — and then captures a rollback snapshot.

There is nothing to do and nothing to remember. Closing the game mid-turn loses at most the orders you had typed but not queued.

Undo and rollback

↩ Undo last turn, in the time panel, restores everything to how it was before the last jump. The game keeps 12 turns of snapshots, so you can step back repeatedly. The panel tells you how many are available.

Roll Back Turn, in the cheats panel, jumps straight to the start of any earlier turn in the stack and discards everything after it.

Both restore the full campaign, not just the map — the events, the conversations, your queued orders, your agents' reports and any papers that reached you all come back as they were. Your standing goal is yours rather than the turn's, so it stays as it is now.

Use undo freely. See time and turns.

Cloning

Both games and scenarios can be cloned from their card in the library — a game from its ⋮, a scenario with Clone Scenario.

Cloning a game is the closest thing to a manual save slot: fork the campaign before doing something reckless, and you keep both branches. Cloning a scenario gives you an editable copy of someone else's world.

Where saves live

Desktop and self-hosted — files on disk, in the app's own data directory. You can back the directory up like any other folder.

Browser — in your browser's storage. This is the one to be careful with: clearing site data clears your campaigns. The game will ask for persistent storage permission when you first play, and you should grant it.

A browser keeps a site's http:// and https:// addresses as two separate stores, so games played on the website before it moved to https were left behind under the old address. The website brings them across by itself when you open it in that browser: your games and scenarios arrive in the library beside the ones you already have — nothing here is replaced, and the old copy is left as it was — along with any settings you have not already set again. If the trip fails, it tries again later, up to three times in all.

Android — on the phone, in the app's storage.

The beta desktop build keeps a completely separate library from the stable one. Installing the beta cannot touch your stable campaigns, and vice versa.

Moving a campaign between machines

Games export as one zip. On a game's card, ⋮ → Export saves <name>-game.zip: the world, the clock, events, chats, actions, the advisor's conversation, prompts, colours, flags, tags, intercepts — and every rollback snapshot, so the campaign can be continued and undone on the other side, not just looked at. The card says so while the zip is being built, and the menu reminds you that an exported game carries its conversations, advisors and events, worth a look before you post it anywhere public. Import game (Import Game on beta), in the Games tab's header, brings one back; it lands right beside your current game, marked (Imported) if its name collides with one you already have.

The scenario travels only when it has to. A built-in scenario is not included (everyone has it), nor one that came from the Community Hub (it can be fetched again). A map too large to carry — over 32 MB — is left out rather than crashing the export; the game still exports, and the receiver ends up in the same position as a game whose scenario is missing. A game whose scenario is gone is still listed, opens in the editor, and can still be exported.

Scenarios export and import as a .zip bundle carrying the map, cities, colours, flags and any custom basemap, or as plain .json. Use Import JSON (Import Scenario on beta) in the Scenarios tab's header — it takes either form — or the Download .zip and Download JSON buttons in a scenario's editor drawer. Create Scenario starts a new one as a copy of the built-in world and drops you straight into its editor. To share one on the Community Hub, use ⬆ Publish to Hub in the Community tab, which makes the export for you (see the Community Hub).

In the Android app an export is saved into the phone's Downloads folder, in a folder of its own called Open Historia, where the Files app and the import picker both find it, and a notice offers to share it. On Android 10 and older, where the app may not write to Downloads, it goes to the share sheet instead.

Syncing between devices

There is none. Earlier versions of the website offered an optional sign-in that synced games between devices. It has been retired: there are no accounts, nothing of yours is stored on a server, and the game deletes what an old sign-in left in your browser the next time it opens.

To play the same campaign on another device, move it yourself as described under Moving a campaign between machines above.

If you had an account and want what it stored deleted, see the privacy policy.

Archiving and deleting

Archive, on a game's card, takes it out of the main library view without throwing it away, and the same button becomes Unarchive to bring it back. Useful once you have accumulated a dozen half-finished campaigns.

Delete, in a game's or a scenario's editor drawer, removes it after asking. On the stable build the game has no way to bring it back.

On beta a delete can be undone. Deleted games and scenarios go to a Recently deleted shelf at the bottom of the Games and Scenarios tabs, each with Restore, and Empty deletes the shelf's contents for good. The desktop app keeps them for 30 days; the website and the Android app keep them for a week, and only the last five things you deleted. On the desktop the shelf is shown only on the computer the game runs on, not to other devices on your network. An archived game's card also has its own Delete, and archiving or deleting the game you have open takes you back to the main menu. In All Games, the Active, All and Archived buttons choose which games are shown.

What a save contains

For the curious: five documents per game — the world, the game state, the events, the actions queue and the chat history — plus siblings for colours, flags, tags, rollback snapshots, advisor history and intercepts. The map geometry is its scenario's.

Intercepts are the exception to "it is all just JSON": they are encrypted at rest with a key unique to the campaign.

Next

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.