About Inktide

Inktide is a browser game about drawing a border and holding it. Up to twenty people share one map for five minutes: the land you hold makes soldiers, the soldiers take more land, and whoever holds the most ground when the clock runs out wins. It runs in a browser tab on a phone or a computer, with nothing to install and no account to make. The how to play page explains a match from the first tap, and the strategy guide is for the second week.

Who makes it

Inktide is made and run by the Stigmera games team, a small independent studio. The same people write the code, run the servers and read what players send in from the report button inside the game. There is no publisher between you and us, and no outsourced support desk.

It is the first of a series. The parts every game in the genre needs — the network core that keeps twenty players on one map in step, and the renderer that draws it — are built as a foundation the next games will share, and the rules of this game are kept separate from both. That separation is also why a change to the rules can be tested on its own before it reaches a match.

What we set out to build

Territory games are one of the oldest ideas on the web: a map, a colour for every player, a border that moves. We wanted a version that fits in the five minutes you actually have, that a friend can join from a link without an account, and that treats everybody at the table the same way.

That last part is a list of things the game will not do, and it is written down where you can hold us to it. There is no pay-to-win and there never will be: what can be bought changes how your territory looks, never how it fights. There are no paid random items. Empty seats are filled with bots so a match always starts, and the results say which rows were bots. The rules page has the whole list, and fairness explains what decides who you play against.

The map is abstract on purpose. Its coastlines and terrain come from real map and elevation data, but it has no country names, no national borders and no flags: a match is about the border you draw, not one somebody drew before you. The map data is credited on the terms of service page, as its licences ask.

How it is built

For the curious. The server is authoritative: it runs every match at ten ticks a second, checks every order a player sends, and nothing a browser claims is taken on trust. The simulation is deterministic — the same map and the same orders produce the same match, to the last tile — which is what makes a replay of a finished match exact rather than approximate. The map is drawn by the graphics card in a single pass, which is how a phone keeps up with a match of twenty. None of this needs a download: it is an ordinary web page.

How to reach us

• [email protected] — anything at all: a bug, a question, an idea.
• [email protected] — somebody's conduct, a report, or an appeal against a moderation decision.
• [email protected] — what we hold about your account, a copy of it, or deleting it. The privacy policy says what that is.

Inside the game, the flag on the edge of the screen sends us a problem report with the match it came from attached, and every screen that shows another player has a Report button for their conduct.