How it works
A run
Seven rounds. Each round deals one historical army, and you take one of its seven options into an empty slot of your own: a general, infantry, cavalry, ranged troops, an elite unit, support and a tactic. Once in a run you can swap a card you don’t want for a reserve.
Then your army fights ten battles against the armies of the run, weakest first, each on its own ground. On an assault you attack and must break them. On a hold they attack and you must not break. The goal is ten wins out of ten.
A battle
Every battle is fought in four phases.
- Missiles. Archers, guns and catapults shoot. Horses are big targets; armour and shields protect.
- The charge. Cavalry, elephants and fast infantry hit what they hurt most, and shooters fire at them as they come. Pikes stop horses, and stakes stop charges.
- Melee. Up to six rounds. Numbers only count if they can reach the fight, and horse archers on open ground can’t be caught.
- Morale. After every round each side checks whether it breaks. Veterans stand longer than levies, and an outgeneralled or surrounded army runs sooner.
The ground changes everything. Hills, forests, rivers, mud and walls slow cavalry and blunt missiles; a mountain pass or a wall lets a few hold many. A defender that doesn’t break has held the field.
Every unit is rated from 1 to 10 against its own era: the Spartan hoplites and Napoleon’s Imperial Guard are both a 10. What each kind of unit does still matters: guns frighten elephants, and pikes stop horses.
Is it rooted in fact?
The same rules re-fight sixteen real battles with the armies that actually fought them, at the sizes in the historical record, 400 times each. The real winner has to win most of the replays.
- Agincourt, 1415 England won. Longbows behind stakes cut down French knights wading through mud. 100%
- Crécy, 1346 England won. French cavalry charged uphill into English archers. 100%
- Carrhae, 53 BC Parthia won. Horse archers with a camel train of arrows wore down legions that could never close. 100%
- Cannae, 216 BC Carthage won. Hannibal let his centre bend and closed the trap. 100%
- Zama, 202 BC Rome won. Scipio opened lanes for the elephants. 100%
- Gaugamela, 331 BC Macedon won. The phalanx held while Alexander drove straight at Darius. 74%
- Hydaspes, 326 BC Macedon won. Pikes and cavalry broke Porus’s elephants. 79%
- Thermopylae, days 1–2, 480 BC The Greeks won. In a pass, numbers stopped mattering. 97%
- Hastings, 1066 The Normans won. Feigned retreats drew the shield wall off the ridge. 98%
- Ain Jalut, 1260 The Mamluks won. The Mongols were drawn into a valley and attacked from the hills. 100%
- First Panipat, 1526 Babur won. Guns panicked the elephants; horse archers wheeled round both flanks. 100%
- Nagashino, 1575 Oda Nobunaga won. Cavalry charged across a stream into volleys behind a palisade. 100%
- Vienna, 1683 The relief army won. The Winged Hussars led the largest cavalry charge in history. 100%
- Austerlitz, 1805 France won. Napoleon struck the weakened Allied centre. 80%
- Isandlwana, 1879 The Zulu won. The horns closed round a British line spread too thin. 100%
- Rorke’s Drift, 1879 The British won. About 150 soldiers behind mealie bags held off 3,000–4,000. 100%
No rule was written for a single battle. Each one applies to every battle, for a reason that holds in all of them.
Fair dice
Chance plays a part, as it did: a unit has a good day, a general a bad one. But every roll comes from the run’s code, so the same code and the same choices always give the same ten battles. Everyone gets the same Daily, which changes for the whole world at once at midnight UTC, and its dice are rolled on our server from a secret code, so no one can look up the best draft before they play. A challenge link lets a friend play your armies with your dice, so the only difference between your result and theirs is the choices you made.
Credits
Unit notes draw on English Wikipedia; on the result screen, each unit in your army links to its article. Type is Source Serif 4 and IBM Plex Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License. Nothing on this site is loaded from anywhere else; no accounts and no cookies. Your results are saved in this browser’s local storage, on this device only.