DANKGAMES

Conquest is the whole game, and the one PLAY starts. Your army begins as 30 spearmen, 12 archers, 10 dire wolves and 5 shieldmen, with 500 gold, 5 wood and 5 ore, and it holds 6 stacks at most. Each day the hero has 12 movement, where a road tile costs 1 and a swamp tile 4, so the map is a budget: gather gold and ore, flag mines for income, hire troops in your town, and choose which lairs are worth a fight. Each lair shows who guards it and what a win pays before you commit, and clearing one pays 100, 200 or 300 gold by its size. The boss, Haskett, grows a little every day and shrinks for every lair you clear, and his lair stays sealed until you have broken 2 of his three wardens. New troops arrive every 3 days, when the dwellings refill. If your last stack falls, or day 11 ends with him still in his lair, the match is lost; a win scores 1000, plus 100 for each day left.

Quick battle, in the title’s menu, is one fight: you draft an army from 1000 gold, at most five stacks, and the computer drafts its own without seeing yours. Every fight in the game, quick or not, is played on an 8 by 10 board where the fastest stack acts first and a stack struck in melee swings back once per round; after 40 rounds the side with more hit points left wins.

Duel is a match for two on one shared map: each of you has a hero, a town and an army, you both play every day at the same time, and there is no boss. It ends in one final battle between the two armies, on day 12 at the latest. Invite a friend makes a private six-character code and a link to send; your friend types the code into Join a code or simply opens the link, and the duel starts the moment they join. Blitz, Standard and Slow set the clocks, from 30-second days to 3-minute ones. Play the computer is a practice duel that runs entirely in your browser.

The honest limits: DANKGAME draws its battlefield with WebGL and there is no version without it, so a browser with WebGL switched off (some battery-saver and privacy modes do this) cannot run it. A Conquest is kept on your own device, with no account: a reload offers Continue, and to carry on from another phone or computer, Settings’ Move my save to another device gives an 8-character code that works once, within 24 hours. A Duel is only ever with the friend you send the code to, or with the computer, and online duels are played only on dankgame.com itself. The title screen calls it an early build, and it is still changing: the older one-battle game was retired on 5 October 2026.

Four heroes wait by the campfire: the Warrior fights up close, the Mage casts fire, frost and lightning from range, the Bonecaller fights through the dead he raises, and the Mender heals, wards and hastes. Each level up to 30 brings a point for the hero's skill tree, which shows every skill, passive and evolution from the first floor, and he can carry up to six at once. Every fifth floor is a boss, and the deeper the floor, the harder the monsters and the better the loot.

Anything you pick up is only carried until you get home. Town Portal works on any floor, even mid-fight: stand still for 1.5 seconds and everything you carry is banked, free. Die instead and the items you carry are lost, though you keep 75% of the gold. The honest limits: the game says of itself that it is in development and that its art, balance and floors still change, so it is not quite the same game from one week to the next. You can play alone (a computer-played companion can join you) or as one of up to five heroes in one dive: send an invite link, tap another player’s hero in the shared town, or join a public game from the town’s board, and each of you picks up only your own drops. Playing together needs a live connection, with no account and no text chat, just four pings. It is in English only, and your heroes and stash live in this browser, so another device starts fresh.

Six clues are on offer: daytime high, night low, rain days, UV index, sea temperature (or no coast at all) and humidity. Each costs 1 point, a wrong accusation costs 2 and removes that city, and fewest points wins. Par is the fewest clues a perfect solver needs to be certain, worked out exactly over every combination of clues, and a day's board is only accepted if par is 2, 3 or 4 — no single clue gives it away. Everyone gets the same board on the same UTC day. The honest limits: the clues are monthly averages from Open-Meteo's climate archive — 2020–2024 for most of them, 2023–2024 for sea temperature and UV — not today's weather, so it rewards knowing climates rather than reading a forecast; it needs JavaScript; and your streak lives in your own browser's storage.

A Map page draws the chain as 26 nodes and fills one in each time you solve the puzzle behind it; a node you have not reached stays grey and labelled ??? so the map never names a step for you. The honest limits: there are no hints and no timer, so a step can take two minutes or two days; keys are case-sensitive, so CrossRoad and crossroad are different answers; and because each puzzle's address is its key, sending someone a link to the page you are on hands them the answer. Progress lives in your own browser's storage, and the site needs JavaScript.

The link-paired game carries a chat box that runs browser to browser when that connection can be made, and when it cannot, the game simply carries on without it. The same page teaches as well as plays — it walks the main openings move by move, Italian, Ruy Lopez, Sicilian and others, covers the rules that catch people out, and hands you six tactics boards where you play the move instead of reading about it.

Everybody gets the same board each day: 19×19, built in your own browser out of the UTC date, with no account and nothing to install.

Twenty pellets are revealed one at a time, and the one due after the lit one is drawn as a dim ring, so a turn is a decision instead of a reflex. A run ends in exactly three ways: CLEAR if you take all twenty, DEAD if you drive into the border, a rock or your own trail, and STRANDED the moment the pellet you still need is walled off — the game says so there and then rather than making you prove it. You are scored on pellets first and cells second, against a par the board generator walked itself before the board shipped: board 251, the one for 2026-09-08, pars at 242 cells and has 50 of its 361 cells under rock. Steering is one thumb — tap the side of the screen you want to go, or use the arrow keys on a desktop. The honest limits: taking the short way to each pellet is precisely how you seal yourself in, and that route ended our run STRANDED on 8 of 20 after 77 cells; the snake is already moving the moment the page opens, so an untouched board is dead in about a second; and only your first three runs on a board are scored, the rest being practice. Older boards stay open — add ?b=251 to the URL for board 251, or any lower number for an earlier day.