DANKGAMES

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.

The draft is the first half of the game. There are eight kinds of unit and room for five stacks: a spearman has 10 hit points and walks, a drake has 60, flies over everything and is the fastest thing on the roster. Pressing max on the spearmen really does buy eighty-three of them for 996 gold; the same button on the drakes buys three for 780 and leaves you a knight's worth of change. Buying wide and buying tall are both real answers, and neither of you finds out which the other chose until the armies are on the ground.

Then both armies appear at once along opposite edges of a 14×10 field, and the fastest stack acts first. A stack moves, strikes, shoots, braces, or waits for a better moment — and whatever you hit swings back, but only once a round. A stack is a group rather than a single piece, so damage comes off its head count: in the battle played to write this card, a stack of five archers hit a knight stack for 14 and killed one knight, and the knights swung back for 32 and killed four of the archers. The boulders scattered over the ground are mirrored across the centre line, so the terrain never decides it.

Nobody to send a link to? Press Play the machine and the server plays the other side: it is a program, not a person, it buys its army the moment you press, and it answers the instant you finish a move. Same rules, same board — one click, no account, nobody to wait for. The other way round is two people: one of you presses Start a match, gets a link and sends it to the other; it seats two, there is no account on either side, and anyone arriving third is told this match already has two players. Reloading does not end the match — the seat is held on the server, so a refresh drops you straight back into the same battle on the same round. The honest limits: there is no matchmaking, so the two-player game needs a link you send to someone yourself; there is no queue that will find you a stranger. And the server drops a match nobody has touched for six hours, which makes a stale link a dead one.

Everyone who opens the page on the same UTC day gets the same board, which makes this a decision rather than a reflex test: sparks fly straight through the gaps earlier blasts leave behind, so you can trace where a chain will run before you commit to it. Each day's board is auditioned rather than merely generated: the game solves all 49 possible openings and re-rolls, up to 400 times, until the best tap clears at least 18 cells, the fifth-best opening still manages 45% of what the best one does, and the median opening comes in at no more than 35% of it — so several taps are worth weighing and tapping at random is reliably punished. You get one tap on today's board and unlimited practice boards beside it, so learning costs nothing and the day still costs a single decision. Afterwards there is a result to copy: the cells you cleared, the best any opening on that board could have cleared, and a ten-square bar between them — no cell positions, so pasting it into a group chat spoils nothing for whoever reads it. Nothing goes to a server and there is no sign-up, so the streak counter sits in your own browser's storage and clearing your site data clears it.

Your opponent is the machine, or one other person you send a link to: it seats two, you both commit blind, and the orders turn over together. There is no server holding the match, so when the other tab closes it stops there, and starting again needs a fresh link. This and the daily puzzle above used to share one page at dankgame.com; they now have a URL each, and the front door there is DANKGAME.