Warbandry · the arena
The whole path a player walks: turn coins into creatures, put a warband in the arena, watch the fight, take the winnings home. You wager coins. You never wager your creatures.
Every number on this page is a starting value — the dials the game launches with, adjustable by the operators, with the hard limits written into the contracts.
◆01
You do not mint a creature. You buy the coin on its pool, and the coin does the rest.
Taking one creature out of a warband and giving it its own card costs a small fee in coins: 2% of what that creature froze, capped at 10%, burned. Moving a card back into a warband costs nothing. So the direction that fragments your collection is the one that costs, and the direction that builds it is free.
Every creature in it is holding coins, and those coins are still there. Melt the warband and they come back, minus the fee. That is the floor under the thing, and it does not depend on anyone wanting to buy it.
Not the operators, not a pause switch, not a match that never finished. Melting is yours, always, and there is no lever anywhere that delays it.
A warband holds five seats beside the sixteen that fight. Each of the five names the fielded creature it may replace, and the opponent sees none of it. Composing also picks one of two modes, and the mode decides how a swap is chosen once a match starts.
Manual puts the choice inside the match: the pairing shows both sixteen, and each side has a window to send up to three swaps. Automatic writes the choice in advance, as one condition and a fixed set of swaps. The condition is one sentence about the opponent, "at least six undead", "at least four copies of one creature", naming a faction, a type, a class, a named creature or a stack; the arena reads it against the warband it faces and applies the swaps at the result. An automatic warband asks nothing of its owner once the match starts, so a closed tab still plays the rule.
▤02
The arena holds a balance for you, and it is what makes fighting feel like a game rather than a chain of transactions.
Deposit coins into the arena once. Top it up any time, including while you are mid-fight. Withdraw any time. Depositing and withdrawing are the only two moments in the whole game when you send a real transaction to the arena.
What you can take out right now. Winnings land here. Refunds land here. Nothing you have to claim, no button that must be pressed before the money is yours.
What is riding on fights in progress. It moves back to free when the match settles — grown if you won, gone if you lost, whole if the fight never happened.
Deposited once. Every match you actually play takes a small fixed fee from it, which pays the referee for the work of running the tick. Fixed, not a share of your stake: the work is the same whatever you wager.
Because your stake is already inside the arena, entering a fight is one click and one signature. It is not a transaction. You pay no gas for it and you wait for no block — you sign a short message saying which bracket and which warband, and you are in. One click is one match. Nothing ever enters you into a fight you did not ask for.
Withdrawing your free balance can never be blocked. Not by us, not by a pause, not by a match that never resolved, not by anything. It is the one promise the arena makes above all others, and it is written into the contract rather than into a policy.
▷03
Six words appear on the screen, in this order. Here is what each one means and roughly how long it lasts.
You pick a bracket and a warband and click once. Your stake moves from free to engaged, and your entry goes into the pool sealed: from this moment until the pairing, nobody can see which warband you brought — not the other players, not us.
Every thirty seconds or so the arena runs a tick. It opens every sealed entry waiting in your bracket at once and pairs them off. If nobody suitable is waiting, you stay in the pool and the next tick tries again — with no new click and no new signature.
You can close the tab. The referee carries your entry through, and whatever happens is waiting on your balance when you come back.
The screen shows both warbands, how they match up, both ratings, and the exact odds. Both entries were sealed before either side could see the other, and neither composition can move now. In a bracket that runs a window, the reserve is the one thing still open.
Both sides see each other's sixteen, and each has its own reserve on screen beside a countdown: up to three swaps, one signature. The arena holds both answers sealed until it has both, then reveals them together, so a match whose two players answer in ten seconds starts in ten seconds rather than at the end of the window.
The screen says it before the countdown starts: silence plays your sixteen as composed. Nothing is forfeited for staying quiet, and a swap that would break the format is dropped while the rest of the warband fights.
A bracket set to automatic runs no window. The rule written on each warband applies on its own, and the screen goes from the pairing to the result.
The dice land and the fight is decided. Anyone can read the result at the same moment you do; your screen replays the fight so you can watch it happen rather than read a number.
The result names the swaps that applied on each side, the creatures that came in, and, now that the fight is over, the opponent's whole reserve. That is the whole of what an opponent's reserve ever shows.
The pot lands on the winner's free balance and both ratings move. Play again with one click, recompose, or withdraw — whichever you like, immediately.
The felt wait for a match is well under a minute when both players answer their window quickly, since the fight starts on the second answer. The gap between result and settled exists because the outcome is public before the money moves; showing them as one state would make a slow payout look like a missing one.
▣04
A bracket is a stake level and a format. It says nothing about who you are — your level is your rating, and the rating decides who you meet, never where you may play.
Its stake is set in coins, sized on what a creature costs to freeze. More brackets can be opened later; the arena is built for several running side by side.
Nothing staked, nothing kept. It is where you learn the game, test a build and see the screens work before any of your coins are on the table.
Your composition is checked while you build it. If the warband is not legal for a bracket, the button greys out and tells you exactly which rule you broke — you never discover it by losing a fight.
The same rules are checked again on the warband a swap produces, so an adjustment can only ever hand the arena a legal warband. A reserve of five legendaries brings in the two the format allows and no more.
The arena keeps 5% of every pot. Half of that is burned; the other half funds the season's rewards. The contracts cap it at 15%, so it cannot be raised past that by anyone running the game. The free bracket keeps nothing, because there is nothing to keep.
The same warband can sit in several brackets at once. But entering is final for that match: a cancel is honoured at the next tick, and only if nobody was there to fight you. That single rule is what stops a player from watching a strong opponent arrive and quietly stepping out of the way.
◈05
One number per season, kept on the chain, and the only thing that decides whom you face.
◌06
There is exactly one way to lose your stake, and it is losing a fight. Everything else in the list below either refunds you or makes you wait.
| What happens | Where your stake ends up |
|---|---|
| You lose the fightThe one and only way to lose a stake. Your creatures are never at risk — a warband cannot be won, taken or damaged in the arena. | Lostit goes to the winner |
| You win the fightBoth stakes make the pot. | Wonthe pot, minus the 5% cut |
| Nobody suitable is waitingNo player near your rating is free, or you fought the only candidate less than an hour ago. | You waitstill in, one more tick |
| Your warband changed between the click and the pairingYou sold it, recomposed it, or it stopped being legal for the bracket. The fight cannot be run on a warband that is no longer the one you entered. | Refundedwith the reason, less a small fixed fee |
| The window closes with nothing sentYour sixteen fight as you composed them. Staying quiet costs nothing, and an adjustment that fails a check is dropped the same way. | You fightyour base warband plays |
| The referee misses your entryNot your doing, and you gained nothing by it: nothing was visible to anyone before the tick. | Refundedin full |
| An outage on our sideIf the referee is down when a tick is due, the tick simply does not happen. Everyone stays in the pool, still engaged, and the screen says searching for one beat longer. | You waitone more tick |
| The result is in and nobody pays it outA settle button appears on the match. You can press it, and so can anyone else — whoever does is reimbursed for the gas out of the fee pot. | Waitinga button away, never stuck |
| The chain itself stopsNothing moves and nothing is lost. Rolls and matches left in the air resume when the chain does. | You waitnothing is lost |
| The arena is switched off for goodThe game can be unhooked from the collection. If it ever is, it unwinds rather than freezes. | Refundedeverything engaged goes back to free |
The small fee kept on a refused entry is not a punishment. It pays for the work the referee already did on your entry, and it is what stops sending junk entries all day from being free.
In a pool of two players, your opponent knows who you are. Whatever the sealing does, someone who sees a single address waiting can look up the warbands that address owns and build something to beat them. Nothing in a contract fixes that; it is a question of how many people are playing. What bounds it is the hour: they get one match against you, and then the door closes until the hour is up.
❖07
Two things a player is entitled to check rather than believe.
The exact chance of any warband beating any other is a calculation on public data. Anyone can run it, on any matchup, before a single coin is staked. You do not have to: the game puts the number on screen the moment an opponent is found.
The dice come out of a block of the chain that has not been made yet at the moment the last decision of the match is in. Nobody can read a block that does not exist, on either side of the table. Where a window is open the block is picked once both answers are revealed, since a player who could read the dice first would send the swap that wins them.
There is one actor who could, in principle, lean on which block gets made: the operator of the chain itself. Nothing in this game can prevent that, so it is not presented as prevented. It is written down as an accepted risk, watched, and revisited if a bracket ever carries pots big enough to be worth a chain's reputation.
❐08
Every path a match can take, in one picture. The spine is what you see on screen; each branch to the right is what happens instead when something goes another way.