Why the map has no countries

15 September 2026, from the Stigmera games team.

Any screenshot of Inktide shows the same kind of picture: coastlines, rivers, hills, and a patchwork of colours spreading across them. What no screenshot shows is the name of a country, a line between nations, or a flag. That is not a missing feature. It is one of the few things in the project written down as a hard limit, in the same short list as the promise that nothing on sale wins a match, and this post explains where the limit came from and how the game keeps it.

The rule, in one line

Coastlines and terrain are welcome. Country names, national borders and flags are not. The players are the only nations a match ever has, and each of them is a colour on the board plus a name: one picked by the player, or one assembled by the server from a short list of houses and animals.

Why we drew the line there

A territory game is a game about borders, and a border laid over a real country is a statement about real people. A match in which somebody's home region is the prize, or in which two strangers act out a conflict that is still going on, is not the five minutes of play we set out to make. Players from everywhere meet in the same lobby. A board with no politics printed on it is the only board all of them can sit down at on equal terms.

It also keeps a match about the part that is genuinely interesting. The frontier that decides a game is the one you push forward in the first minute and hold in the last, and it did not exist until the whistle blew.

Two kinds of map, one rule

The shared public map, First Tide, is prepared ahead of time by our map pipeline from open data: the shape of the land from Natural Earth, rivers and lakes from OpenStreetMap, and elevation from the Copernicus digital elevation model. Real terrain gives the board valleys and shorelines that are hard to fake. Only the physical layers are used; nothing political is read in. The licences of that data ask for credit, which is why the terms of service name all three sources.

Private rooms, duels and challenges are played on maps generated from a single number called a seed. The generator makes sea, lowland, highland and rivers, and it has no concept of a real place: a generated map has no field that could hold a place name at all. Generated relief was our first answer, in August, after we looked at real elevation data and decided against it, partly because of what its licence terms would have asked of the game for good. A generated map owes nobody anything, and a given seed produces an identical map on the server and in your browser, which is how a replay can rebuild a finished match tile for tile.

Kept by the build, not by good intentions

Choosing a rule is easy; keeping it through years of edits is not. So the map pipeline checks every name that could end up in a map before the map is built, whether it is a layer from a data source or an object somebody placed by hand in the map editor. A name containing a word such as border, boundary, nation, flag, kingdom, republic, empire, province or state is refused outright, and so is a name that is exactly the name of a country. A map carrying one of them fails to build, which means it can never reach a server or a player.

Country names are compared whole, deliberately. A bay whose name starts with the same letters as some country is a coincidence of spelling rather than a claim, and a filter that rejected it would soon be switched off by whoever it annoyed. What the check is for is inattention: a political layer left enabled in a download, or a label typed without a second thought. Somebody determined to break the rule could get around a list of words. The point is that nobody breaks it by accident.

What you see instead

Instead of countries, a match shows you facts that change while you play: every player's colour and name over the ground they hold, their army and their land in the standings, and what it costs to take their tiles. Those are the numbers a decision in Inktide depends on, and none of them existed before the match began. The About page has the rest of what we believe about the game, and the strategy guide is about what to do with the borders you draw.