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:
Placement turns are timed online, like any other turn (see
Turn Timer). If yours runs out, your armies for that turn are
placed for you (one army in Manual, all the rest in Semi-Auto) and play moves on. They go
where they help you most — the same pick a bot makes: toward the continent that's cheapest for you
to complete, onto chokepoints and threatened borders, next to your own territories.
Each turn moves through three phases in order:
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
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.
Capitals only matter when the win condition is Capital Conquest.
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 |
See Win Conditions for how the match actually ends.
Optional (off by default). With fog on, you can only see:
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).
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:
Fights you are in always log, attacking or defending — including when you lose a territory
to an attacker you never saw coming. Troops from card trades are unaffected and log exactly as
they always did.
Every player's turn opens in the battle log with the armies they received (e.g.
Gorthrax +10 armies), in the All view and in that player's own filter. Without fog the
line also itemises where the armies came from (territories, groups, capitals); under fog only
you see that breakdown for your own turns — everyone else's line shows just the total.
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 the replay kept on your own machine is written only
if you hosted, and from your point of view — so that copy can be missing fights you could not
see. The server keeps its own recording with nothing hidden, which is what the ☁ Cloud
tab of the Replay Browser lists for every player who was in the match; that is the copy to watch
a fog match from.
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:
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:
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 during the match: pact offers, acceptances, and breaks are shown only to the
two players involved — never broadcast to the table (a caster or admin watching the match
also sees them). Afterwards they're part of the match replay, like pact messages, so
anyone who watches the replay can see them. The end-of-match After Action Report shows no
pact figures at all, and a replay's Match Stats report shows your own and — for
everyone else's. (Your lifetime Pacts Made / Broken totals on your profile are public as
always.)
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.
Strategy messages: with a pact active you can send your partner a short private message
built from three picks — an action, a player, and a tone:
The message sends as icons, not words: the action's icon, then the player, then the
tone's icon — the same left-to-right order you picked them in. So you can send "⚔ White
👍", "🛡 me ?" or "🤝 you !". The tone is always the last icon, 👎 included — "⚔ White
👎" is how you say "don't attack White". A live preview shows the exact line before you
send it, and both partners read the identical message. It needs an active pact, and
it needs pacts enabled for the match. The four quick private reactions (👍 👎 ❤ 💔) are
still there alongside the composer.
Who sees them: during the match, only you and your partner — plus a caster or admin if
one is watching the match. Afterwards they're saved in the match replay, in its 💬 Chat
tab, the same as the quick private reactions — so every player in the match, and anyone a
replay is shared with, can read them there (with "me" and "you" shown as player names). They're
preset picks, never anything you typed.
See the Privacy Policy for how long chat is kept.
No free typing: every message in Pact or Peril is a preset choice — pact messages,
emotes, and quick chat alike. There is nowhere in the game to type a message to another
player.
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.) In Casual you can pick your team in the lobby
to play with friends; anyone else — and everyone in Ranked — is dealt at random. Teams take
turns in rotation unless a Casual host chose Fully random turns. Each team's number and
colour (1 Red, 2 Blue, 3 Yellow, 4 Green) show on the point of its players' banners. See
Team Size.
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.)
Some maps have a day / night cycle. It's part of the map, not a lobby setting — the map's
creator turns it on and chooses how long a day and a night last (see
Map Editor). It's off unless the map turns it on.
Time passes as the match is played. Each of these moves the clock on by one minute, so
60 of them make an hour:
Bots' actions count exactly the same. If your turn timer or
Correspondence deadline runs out and the game places your troops for you,
that's one minute for each territory it places troops on. The opening setup placements,
capital picks, card trades, moving troops in after a conquest, and actions that are refused
don't move the clock.
Every match starts at a random time of day.
The sun moves across the board. It rises in the east, turns golden at dawn and dusk, and
sets in the west; at night a cool moon lights the board. Player colours stay easy to tell apart
after dark.
A clock in the top bar, next to the round number, shows the time and whether it's day or
night — for example 14:32 · Day or 03:10 · Night. The sun rises at 06:00 on the clock.
The clock only appears on maps with the cycle on.
Everyone sees the same time — it's kept for the whole match, not per player.
Purely for looks. Day and night don't change any rules — combat, reinforcements, fog and
everything else work the same around the clock.
A lobby picks one of four ways to win:
Control every territory on the map — you (or your team) must own the whole board.
(This is the default win condition.)
Hold a set share of the map at the same time — the same race, but you don't have to take
every last tile. The moment you (or your team) are holding the target number of territories,
the match ends.
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 World 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.
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 four win conditions, and it's checked before them, so it can end a Capital
Conquest or King of the Hill match early too.
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.
After you're out. Whether you resigned or were conquered, you stay in the match and get a
defeat card (RESIGNED or CONQUERED). From it you can Spectate the rest of the match
or leave with Main Menu (Your Games in a Correspondence match). Spectating isn't offered in a
Fog of War match; there you can only leave. While you're spectating, Esc or
the Resign button asks whether you want to leave.
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.
Very rarely, an admin (Pact or Peril staff) steps into a live online match to fix a
problem: a stuck turn, a broken match, abusive play, or a tournament ruling. Admins are not
casters — a caster only ever watches. Admins don't step into Correspondence
matches.
You'll always know. Every change an admin makes is announced to the whole table in the
battle log, on a line starting with ⚙ (for example ⚙ An admin ended Gorthrax's turn. It is
now White's turn.). If the territory involved is hidden from you by
Fog of War, you get a general line instead (⚙ An admin changed troop counts on
the board.) that doesn't reveal where. Every admin action is also logged and audited on our
side.
What an admin can do:
Ranked is different: in a Ranked match admins never make game-affecting changes —
no troop, territory, turn, bot or player changes. In ranked an admin can
only stop the match (a no contest), restart it, put its result on hold for review (the
result is recorded, but rank points aren't paid until an admin releases or voids it) or, in extreme
cases, end it with a named winner.
See also: Combat & Dice · Cards · Match Settings