The deepest college basketball dynasty sim on mobile. Recruit, work the transfer portal and NIL, run a live possession-by-possession sim, and build a program across 20-plus year careers. Free. No paywalls on dynasty mode.
Every game plays out possession by possession. The clock runs, the score swings, runs build, and foul trouble bites. You decide when to call a timeout, when to make a sub, when to press and when to slow it down. The game runs the action. You run the bench. A two-point game in the final minute of March feels like it should.
Careers run 20-plus seasons with no forced endpoint. Program prestige, recruiting reputation, and conference standing all shift dynamically based on results. A dynasty actually feels like one. Early seasons are a grind, later seasons are about defending what you built. The sim does not let you stay comfortable for long.
Every offseason you scout high school prospects, work the transfer portal, and manage an NIL budget to land and keep talent. Every player has a position, class year, archetype, upside, and hometown. Roster construction is a real decision, not just picking the highest-rated guy. Build for the long term or patch holes for a tournament run. Both have costs.
Full stat cards for every player. Points, rebounds, assists, shooting splits, efficiency, usage, and national percentile rankings, built to feel like the tools real scouts and analysts use, not placeholder numbers. The player card has the depth of a real scouting report. You can actually evaluate your roster.
Coaching staff, AD pressure, job security, and program trajectory all run underneath the surface. Build something sustainable or chase short-term wins and face the consequences. One bad season starts the calls. Two bad seasons and the AD is making a change. The pressure builds the way it does in real life.
Selection Sunday, the full bracket, and the run to the national title all play out in full. Every game matters. One bad night ends the season. The bracket is real and the stakes feel real. Cutting down the nets after five seasons of building a program from scratch is the payoff the game is designed around.
Full conference schedules across all 23 conferences. Your program's reputation within its conference affects recruiting pull, scheduling strength, and tournament seeding. Conference rivals matter. Getting knocked around in conference play has real downstream consequences, on recruiting, on rankings, on the AD's patience.
My name is Finn Keating. I'm a college student based in Rhode Island and I build sports sim games by myself. No team. No publisher. No outside developers. Everything in Hardwood Empire, the engine, the sim logic, the recruiting and portal systems, the live play-by-play, the design, the product, I built all of it.
I launched Hardwood Empire during March Madness 2026 and it hit #1 in App Store Sports and Simulation within 48 hours. No paid acquisition, just the game and the community. It has grown to tens of thousands of players, with a real community on Reddit and Discord and new updates shipping every week.
The goal has always been a sim that feels deep without feeling overwhelming. Recruiting that matters, a live game that feels like the real thing in the final minute, and dynasties that hold up across twenty-plus seasons. It is still being made better every single week, by one person, based on what players actually ask for.
Hardwood Empire launched during March Madness, the biggest week of the college basketball calendar, and hit #1 in App Store Sports and Simulation within 48 hours. No paid acquisition, no publisher. Right game, right week, and a sim deep enough that players stayed.
Tens of thousands of players, an active community on Reddit and Discord, and new updates every week. Most of what ships comes straight from what players ask for. The game is still being made deeper and better, by one developer, every single week.