RSW Downloadable Client

The RSW Client is a standalone application you can download and run on your own computer to present the turn information from your RSW games in an easy-to-understand graphical fashion. It provides a friendly menu-based system for entering and checking your orders, eliminating the need to memorize cryptic order abbreviations, and it automatically handles downloading and integrating the latest turn reports, and uploading your orders. Once you have signed up for a game here on the website, you can play out the entire game using just the RSW Client. You can also use the RSW client to play an official game of Starweb® as offered by Flying Buffalo, Inc. (RSW has no affiliation with Flying Buffalo, Inc.)

RSW Client screenshot

It is not strictly necessary to use the RSW Client application to play RSW--this game was originally designed to be played by people using pencils and lots of scratch paper. Some people do enjoy the experience of working out their turns entirely by hand.

However, the game client can be used to eliminate a lot of the tedium of planning each turn, in the same way that a good word processor can make it much easier to write a term paper. Also, using this client may make the game much more approachable for a newcomer. If this is your first experience with RSW, we recommend you download and use this game client to play the game, instead of studying the turn reports available here on the web page.

Download links

The following client applications are the most current versions available for download, for each supported platform. We recommend you download the version specific to your platform, if it is available. The platform-specific versions are generally self-contained and do not require additional by-hand downloads or installation on your part.
Windowsrswclient-1.0.8.7-en-win64-gui.exe
Macintosh OS X 10.11 or betterrswclient-1.0.8.6-en-osx-gui.dmg
Platform-independent Python sourcerswclient-1.0.8.7-en-src-gui.zip

If there is not a version specific to your platform, you may download the Python source archive; in this case, you will also have to download and install Python 2.7 and wxPython 4.0 (if they are not already installed on your machine).

Third-party game clients

There are also other client applications, written originally to play Starweb®, that can be used to play RSW as well (Classic type games only). If you are not satisfied with the RSW Client provided above, you may be interested in investigating one of these other applications.

In order to use one of these clients, you must enable the "Interchange" report option in your account game options. This enables a special "Interchange" download format that is suitable for importing into one of these clients.

At the moment, I know of the following third-party Starweb clients:
Flying Moose Technologies' Starweb Analyzer
WebLord

If you know of additional third-party software, please let me know.