28-0 is a browser game about a number that has never happened. Four Grand Slams, seven rounds each, twenty-eight matches in a single season — and no losses. No player in the history of tennis has done it. The game asks whether you could build someone who would.
You don't control a match. You build a player. Six rounds of drafting, two cards each time, pulled from forty-eight of the greatest players the sport has produced. One card might be Novak Djokovic's 2015 return, the season he barely lost. The next might be John Isner's serve, which is enormous, and his movement, which is not. You take one, the other disappears, and you move on. Six picks and you're done — the whole draft takes under a minute.
Because the interesting argument in tennis isn't who wins a rally. It's the one every fan has had: whose forehand, whose backhand, whose head in a fifth-set tiebreak. Combine them and what do you get? That question doesn't need a control scheme. It needs a decision, made quickly, with real trade-offs and no way to undo it.
The trade-offs are the point. Every player in the game exists in two or three career eras — the breakout version, the peak version, and for those who reached it, the veteran version. A twenty-year-old has raw speed and no composure. A thirty-five-year-old has lost a step and gained everything else. Neither is strictly better. Choosing an ageing legend over a rising one is a real decision with a real cost, and the simulation will hold you to it across all twenty-eight matches.
A perfect run is meant to be rare. Roughly three percent of optimally drafted builds finish 28-0, and that number was chosen before the game was tuned, not discovered afterwards. Most runs end somewhere in the low twenties — deep enough to feel close, short of the thing you were chasing. That gap is deliberate. A sweep you can reach in five attempts isn't worth chasing at all.
The surfaces matter too. Wimbledon rewards a serve. Roland Garros rewards movement and the ability to keep a ball in play through a long rally. The hard courts don't care either way. A build that dominates on grass can come apart on clay, and the results screen will tell you which stat let you down.
28-0 is made by one person, as a side project, because the idea wouldn't go away. There's no studio and no funding behind it. It's free, it runs in a browser with nothing to install, and you can play the whole thing without making an account. Signing in exists only so you can put a name instead of a random handle on the leaderboard.
It's built for people who follow tennis and have opinions about it — and for people who just want a game that respects sixty seconds of their time. If you know why Wawrinka's backhand is on the list, you'll enjoy the draft. If you don't, the numbers still tell you enough to make a good decision.
Questions, bugs, or a player you think is missing: get in touch.