The complete rules of a match: how a turn flows, how armies are calculated, and every special
rule (capitals, the Hill, fog, firestorms, portals, pacts) that a lobby can switch on.
Most numbers here are the default ruleset — many are lobby-configurable. See
Match Settings for what a host can change, and what's locked in
Ranked. Combat has its own page: Combat & Dice.
Everyone starts with the same pool of armies, scaled to the player count and map size. On a
standard 42-territory map:
| Players |
Starting armies |
| 2 |
40 |
| 3 |
35 |
| 4 |
30 |
| 5 |
25 |
| 6+ |
20 |
On larger or smaller maps this scales automatically (roughly one army per territory you'll
own, plus a buffer).
How territories and armies are placed depends on the Troop Placement setting:
- Auto — territories are dealt out and all your armies are scattered randomly. The game
jumps straight into play. (Default.)
- Semi-Auto — territories are dealt out, but you place your armies one at a time. It's
"blind" — a reveal screen shows everyone's placement at the end.
- Manual — classic Risk: players take turns claiming unclaimed territories (1 army
each), then place the rest openly on territories they own.
Each turn moves through three phases in order:
- Receive your new armies (see Reinforcements) and place them on
territories you own.
- Trade in card sets for bonus armies here, if you have a valid set. See Cards.
- Attack adjacent (or portal/lane-connected) enemy territories with the dice. Attack as often
as you like.
- Conquer a territory and you advance armies into it. Capture at least one territory this
turn and you'll draw a card when the turn ends.
- Full mechanics: Combat & Dice.
- Make one army move between two connected territories you own, to shore up a border or
mass for next turn. Then your turn ends.
The round number ticks up each time play wraps back to the first player. A few rules
(like Capital Mode) key off the round number.
At the start of your Reinforce phase you receive:
base + continent bonuses + capital bonus
- Base = your territory count ÷ 3 (rounded down), with a minimum of 3.
So 9 or fewer territories still gives 3; 30 territories gives 10.
- Continent bonuses — for each group you own completely, add its
bonus.
- Capital bonus — in Capital Conquest mode, +2 per capital you own.
- Hill displacement refund — one-off, King of the Hill only. If the vote turned your
territory into the Hill, every army that was standing on it is
handed back in your next batch of reinforcements. It shows on the turn banner as Hill
Displacement Refund.
Plus any bonus armies from trading in cards that turn.
Territories are organized into groups (continents). Owning every territory in a group
pays its bonus armies every turn, for as long as you hold it. Group bonuses are set per
map (commonly around +2, but map-makers choose). Completing and defending a continent is the
core engine of a strong position.
- A firestorm territory inside a group is skipped — you can still "own" the group even
though one member is permanently on fire.
Capitals only matter when the win condition is Capital Conquest.
- Choosing capitals: right after setup there's a Capital Selection phase. Each player
clicks one of their own territories to make it their capital; it gains +3 armies. The
game won't start until every player has a capital (auto-assigned to your strongest territory
if you don't pick one).
- Capital Mode activates in round 3. The first two rounds are a grace period to build up;
from round 3 on, the "capture all capitals" win condition is live and a banner announces it.
- Capitals are stronger: they reinforce +2 armies/turn each, and they defend with 3
dice instead of 2.
- Capitals never catch fire — firestorms won't be placed on a capital.
- A counter shows 🏰 Capitals X / Y, where Y is the total on the map and X is the most held
by any single player/team. Y equals the number of players — everyone places exactly one,
and a capital keeps existing after its owner is eliminated, now under whoever conquered it.
The counter appears from round 3 (there's a matching label in the top bar) and pulses
whenever the number moves.
- The counter is accurate under fog. It always shows the true figures for the
whole map, so you can always tell how close someone is to winning. It's an aggregate only:
it never tells you which capital changed hands, where that capital is, or who is holding
the lead.
See Win Conditions for how to actually win this way.
The Hill only matters when the win condition is King of the Hill. It's a single territory
the whole table fights over, and everyone helps choose it before the first round starts.
Right after setup the game offers a handful of candidate territories, each marked with a
♛ crown. How many depends on how many humans are in the match:
| Humans in the match |
Candidates offered |
| 1–2 |
3 |
| 3–4 |
4 |
| 5+ |
5 |
- Candidates are drawn at random from anywhere on the map. A portal territory can be a
candidate; a firestorm territory never is.
- Everyone votes at once, for 30 seconds — just click a crowned territory. You can change
your mind as often as you like; only your latest vote counts, and each crown shows its
vote count and the colours of the players backing it. (While the vote is open the map shows
only the crowned candidates — ordinary army badges are hidden.)
- Only humans vote — bots sit it out. Candidates are clickable whatever the turn order
says, and even through fog.
- Most votes wins. A tie — including nobody voting at all — is broken at random among
the tied leaders.
- The winner is the Hill for the rest of the match. It never moves, and there's no re-vote.
- It is taken away from whoever owned it and becomes unowned, holding exactly 10 armies.
- The displaced player isn't robbed: every army that was standing there is refunded into
their next batch of reinforcements, itemised on the turn banner as Hill
Displacement Refund. It's a one-off.
- Voting for your own territory is perfectly legal — you get the armies back, but you lose
the tile and everyone starts level against the same neutral 10-army stack.
- The Hill is a public objective. It's always visible to everyone, even with
Fog of War on — its owner, its army count, and every fight over it.
- Otherwise it's an ordinary territory: attack it from anything connected to it, it defends
with 2 dice like any other tile, and taking it counts as a capture for your
card.
- While the Hill is unowned it still counts as a hole in its continent — nobody collects
that group bonus until someone captures it. (Firestorms are skipped for
group bonuses; the Hill is not.)
- Rounds 1 and 2 score nothing. That's the grace period to fight your way to the Hill.
- From round 3 on, whoever holds the Hill when the round ends scores 1 point. One point per
round, to one side — it's who's standing on it as the round wraps up that counts, not who
held it longest.
- If the Hill is unowned when a round ends, nobody scores that round.
- In Teams, the point goes to the team — it doesn't matter which teammate holds it.
- The ♛ Hill counter in the top-left shows the leading score / the target. Click it to
expand the full standings.
See Win Conditions for how the match actually ends.
Optional (off by default). With fog on, you can only see:
- Territories you own, and
- Territories directly adjacent to one you own.
Everything else is hidden. Portals, firestorms, and — in a King of the Hill match —
the Hill itself are always visible to everyone, so you can
plan around them. The Hill is a public objective: its owner, its army count and every fight
over it are visible to the whole table, fog or no fog.
Fog also hides the numbers on the other players' banners: every rival's troop and territory
totals show as ?? for the whole match, no matter how much of their border you can see. The
one exception is a pact — while a pact is active, the two partners see each other's
totals (never each other's positions).
¶ Fog and the battle log
In a fog match the in-match battle log only reports fights you could actually have watched
happen. A fight is logged only when you can see both territories involved. You still get:
- every attack you make yourself — you own the attacking territory and the defender is
next to it, so both are always visible to you,
- any fight on tiles that pierce fog — portals, firestorms, and the King of the Hill tile
are visible to everyone, so fights on them always log, and
- any other fight you can see both sides of.
Fights you are in always log, attacking or defending — including when you lose a territory
to an attacker you never saw coming. Reinforcement totals and troops from card trades are
unaffected and log exactly as they always did.
Replays are not restricted by this rule. In single-player, a replay's battle log shows every
attack in the match. In an online match, only the host's client saves a replay at all, and it
is recorded from the host's point of view — so a fog match's replay can be missing fights the
host could not see. We're working on it.
This replaced an older rule that logged a fight whenever either side was visible. That quietly
handed over the hidden side's territory name, army count and losses — and worse, printed
nonsense for it, because the numbers for a territory you can't see aren't sent to you at all.
Requiring both sides means a logged fight always has real numbers on both sides of it.
Fog changes what you see — it doesn't change combat math.
Optional (off by default). Before armies are placed, a number of territories are set
permanently ablaze — the count defaults to a value based on the map's size (bigger maps get
more), or the host can pick a specific number. Firestorm territories are dead zones:
- Owned by no one, and removed from the deal.
- Cannot be attacked, reinforced, or claimed.
- Skipped when checking if you own a whole continent (so they don't block group bonuses).
- Never placed on a capital, and never placed in a way that would split the map into
disconnected islands.
They're terrain hazards that reshape the map and force new routes.
Both let distant territories reach each other.
Shipping lanes are connections drawn into a map by its creator. A lane simply makes two
territories count as adjacent — you can attack or fortify across it like any border. They're
permanent (part of the map).
Portals are an optional, dynamic teleport network:
- Portals sit on random territories. Any two open portals are connected to each other —
you can attack or fortify between them no matter how far apart they are on the map. (It's an
all-to-all network, not paired.)
- How many defaults to a number based on the map's size (bigger maps get more), or the host
can pick a specific count. Portals never spawn on two bordering territories — so you can't
portal straight to a next-door neighbour — unless the map is too small to avoid it.
- Off — no portals. (Default.)
- Fixed — portals stay put; every portal flips open↔closed at the start of each round.
- Random — portals open, then close and relocate to new spots over the following rounds.
- Portals are always visible (they pierce fog).
- Portal Chaos (optional): when you attack through an open portal, there's a chance the
attack is redirected to a different random open portal — chaos!
Optional (off by default). A pact is a non-aggression agreement between two players.
- Forming one: open another player's panel and send a pact offer; they accept or
decline. Offers stay valid for 2 minutes.
- Private: pact offers, acceptances, and breaks are shown only to the two players
involved — never broadcast to the table.
- Shared intelligence: while a pact is active, you and your partner each see the other's
total troop count and territory count — even under Fog of War, where every
other player's totals read ??. You do not learn where those armies are: your
partner's individual territories stay fogged exactly as before, you can't see through their
borders, and nobody else at the table sees the numbers. The totals update as the game moves,
and they go dark the instant the pact ends — whether you break it, they break it, or one of
you is taken over by a bot.
- Not a wall: apart from that shared readout, a pact is a social agreement. The game does
not stop you from attacking a pacted ally — and attacking one does not automatically
break the pact (or count against your "pacts broken" record). Breaking a pact is a deliberate
choice.
- Bots don't honor pacts, and when any player is converted to a bot, all their pacts break.
- In Teams mode, teammates share the victory (and ranked RP), but friendly fire is
allowed — nothing stops you from attacking a teammate's territory. (Bots, though, play
cooperatively and won't attack their own team.)
Pacts are a tool for buying time, ganging up on the leader, scouting a fogged board, or setting
up a betrayal. (There's even an achievement for
breaking one.)
A lobby picks one of three ways to win:
Control every territory on the map — you (or your team) must own the whole board.
(This is the default win condition.)
Own every capital on the map (all of them held by you, or by your team). This win is only
checked from round 3 onward — and it's checked the moment round 3 begins, so if you already
hold every capital during the two-round grace period the match ends as soon as the gate opens;
you don't have to wait for the next capture somewhere on the board. Note that capturing every
rival's territory means you hold the whole board — a Global Domination win — so eliminating
everyone is always a valid path here too.
Be first to the points target. One territory — the Hill — is
voted on before round 1. From round 3 onward, whoever holds it when a round ends scores
1 point, and the first player (or team) to reach the target wins.
- Points to win is a lobby setting: 5–25, defaulting to 10 (15 in Teams).
Ranked locks it to 10 — 15 in Teams.
- In Teams, points are banked by the team, and the whole team wins together.
- Owning the whole board still wins, exactly as in Global Domination — so conquest is
always an alternative route.
¶ 🏁 Last side standing (online)
On top of whichever condition the lobby picked, an online match ends the moment only one side
is still in it. If you (or your team) are the last side alive, you win immediately — you do
not have to mop up the territories left behind by rivals who resigned or dropped out. This
applies to all three win conditions, and it's checked before them, so it can end a Capital
Conquest or King of the Hill match early too.
- It's one side, not one player. In Teams you win the moment every opposing side is
out, and the whole team shares the victory.
- Bot seats still count as sides in the game — including a departed player's seat that was
handed to a bot. But if you're the last human side still alive and at least one other
human resigned or dropped out, you're awarded the win against the remaining bots straight
away, provided you hold more territory than every other side still in the game. (A rival
who was simply beaten in combat doesn't count as having left, and a trailing human doesn't get
handed the match — keep playing.)
- Single player plays out in full. Offline against bots there's no early finish: you win the
condition properly — taking every territory, the neutral Hill included, if that's what it takes.
A player is eliminated the moment they hold zero territories. Eliminated players are
skipped in the turn order. Take an opponent's last territory and you inherit their entire
hand of cards — which can be a windfall, but may force you to trade immediately if
it puts you over the 5-card limit.
Resigning is different. A player who resigns is out of the match, but their territories
remain on the board until someone captures them. They no longer count as a side that's still
in the game, so in an online match a resignation can hand the
last side standing win straight to whoever is left.
Being conquered is not quitting. Losing your last territory is a legitimate end to your
match: it's never treated as abandoning the game, so it costs you no ranked strike and you won't
be asked to rejoin the match you just lost. See
Ranked → Leaving, resigning & penalties.
See also: Combat & Dice · Cards · Match Settings