Rock War

Territory war — watch engines play, play against one yourself, or batch-run hundreds of games while iterating on rules.

Board

Army A sideboard
Army B sideboard

Game

Log

Batch simulation

Rules overview

Setup

5×5 board of territories. Each army fields 8×1 scouts, 5×2 soldiers, 3×3 chieftains, 2×5 warlords, 1×8 behemoth (45 pts); any piece of 2+ is a warrior. Placement snakes A B B A — two scouts each onto empty territories; everything else deploys later by spawning and evolving.

Territories & contingents

A territory holds at most 2 pieces, and they must be fibonacci-adjacent: (1,1) (1,2) (2,3) (3,5) (5,8). A contingent is a contiguous group of one army's territories; its strength is the sum of its pieces.

Turns & actions

Each of your contingents takes up to 2 actions whose fibonacci-valued costs sum to at most its strength. On turn 1 the opener acts with one contingent, one action.

  • Spawn (1): place a scout from your sideboard into a contingent territory.
  • Move (cost = |mover − occupant|, scouts always 1): step to an adjacent empty or friendly territory.
  • Evolve (cost = smaller piece): merge a territory's pair into its fibonacci sum — 1+1→2, 1+2→3, 2+3→5, 3+5→8 — via the sideboard.
  • Attack (cost = attacker's value): strike an adjacent enemy territory. Scouts can't attack, and the attacker must be ≥ the territory's total.
  • Coordinated attack (cost = sum): several pieces strike at once — separate territories or combining on one, even from different contingents (each pays its share and spends an action). Defenders can't retreat into any attacked territory — the squeeze comes from geometry, not a shared escape quota.

Combat

Defenders may retreat free into adjacent friendly territories (plus one scout per attack into an empty one). An exact-value tie is mutual destruction — everything dies. A stronger attacker kills the rest: if they were worth more than half the attacker, it devolves into its constituents (3→2+1, 5→3+2, 8→5+3) as it advances; weaker defense dies cleanly.

Obelisks

Four elemental obelisks sit on corner intersections: fire→attack, earth→evolve, air→move, water→spawn. Control one by occupying ≥2 adjacent territories with the strictly greatest adjacent value ≥3. Control grants bonus budget for that mechanic (3→+1, 5→+2, 8→+3, 13→+5 …) that can even fund extra actions past the cap — and an ability, once per obelisk per turn, castable on either player's turn, fueled by sacrificing a piece adjacent to the obelisk. Abilities scale with fervor (your total adjacent value): higher fervor permits bigger fuel, bigger fuel bigger effects — fire deals fuel-value damage split across up to prevFib(fuel) territories; water bounces a piece ≤ fuel to its sideboard; air swaps the locations of one of your lone pieces and a lone enemy piece (both ≤ fuel); earth uses the sacrifice as remote evolution material to level up one of your own pieces.

Winning

Eliminate the enemy's board pieces, leave them with no legal action, or control any three obelisks at once — the completing move wins on the spot. At the turn limit, the army with more board strength wins (obelisks break ties). Full rules, tunable knobs, and sim findings live in rockwar/README.md.

Playing yourself

Pick human as either engine and start a new game. Click a highlighted cell to place scouts; on your turn, click a territory to select it (green = move, red = attack, buttons for spawn / evolve / obelisk abilities), then end turn. Retreats are auto-planned for you, and reaction-window casts, coordinated attacks, and split fire hits aren't offered interactively yet.