A Groot Games title
The mountain
is watching.
Two hosts come to the rim of a living volcano and plant a Banner. Whoever holds the fire longest takes the ground. You get three Commands a turn and one Raid — and a third player nobody commands, reshaping the ring underneath both of you.
No download. No install. Sign in only when you want the ladder.
Four rules, and the argument for each
Three Commands a turn
Fixed, for everyone, on every board. Territory does not buy you more of them — it buys Levy, which is how heavily each one lands. Three clicks, each of them a real decision.
One Raid a turn
Pricing a Raid higher was tried and made matches passive: raids fell from 29 a match to 12 and 55% of turns went silent. So the limit is the count, never the price. Every attack is an event a spectator can follow.
The mountain is the third player
The Arbiter reshapes the ring to keep the fight worth watching. It is bound by nine guardrails, it warns you before it acts, and it scores its own prediction three turns later.
A ban is your lever over it
Before a ranked match each side strikes one of the ten templates. Both strikes apply to both players — the mountain is neutral, so a struck template is simply out of the match.
A single match is not a measurement.
Every ring is generated with exact 180-degree rotational symmetry about the caldera: every square has a twin of identical land, fertility and height on the far side, both capitals are exact opposites, and the Banner sits the same number of steps from each.
So a ranked result is not one match. It is the same seed played twice, once from each seat, and the average of the two is what moves your rating. Take the ground your opponent held, with the same fertility and the same walk to the Banner, and what is left between the two legs is play.
How the ladder works →Same seed. Same shape. Seats swapped. Map luck cancels because both players met the same ground — nothing is written to a rating until both legs are in, and walking out after losing the first one settles the whole pair against you.