A strategy game to play with your friends, from one link

Open a private Inktide room in one tap, send your friends the link, and play five-minute strategy matches together in the browser, with nothing to install and no accounts to make.

Play now Free, in this tab. The button opens the game, where Play with friends makes your room.

One room, one link

On the home screen, Play with friends opens a room of your own and takes you straight to its lobby. Its link carries a six-character code: Invite friends sends it through your phone's share sheet or copies it, and a friend beside you can scan the QR code on your screen. Friends who open the link land in your lobby while it has a seat for them. A code can also be typed into Have a code? on the home screen, and look-alike characters are left out of every code, so one read aloud still works.

The host sets the table

Whoever opened the room is the host, and nothing starts until the host presses Start; a room needs two people. Before that the host picks the map — Skirmish seats four, Coast eight, Expanse twenty — and everyone against everyone or a one-against-one duel. Empty seats stay empty unless the host switches bots on; then bots fill the room to the map's size.

The sea comes in

A room plays with the rising sea: at set points the water advances on a single point of the map, a clock counts down to each rise, and the land furthest from that point goes under first, so the last minutes are a race for the ground the water reaches last. Public matches flood the same way — a room is where your group gets to play it together.

Late arrivals and rematches

A friend who opens the link while a round is running is not sent off to a stranger's match: they wait in the room, watching if the room allows watchers, and they are seated for the next round, unless the host has shut the door to them or the next round is already full. When a match ends the room reopens with the same code, and Play again with this group on the end screen takes each player back to it for the next one.

Watchers and bigger crowds

Anybody with the room's watch link can follow a match in progress without signing up, and the host can switch watching off. A host with an audience can make it an audience room instead: up to sixty-four seats, no bots, and everybody who comes after the seats are gone joins a queue instead of being turned away.

Other ways to play together

A party of up to four friends can queue into public matches as a group, and is seated in the same lobby or not at all. A challenge link hands a friend your exact map against the same bots, then puts both runs side by side. Matches in a room pay no experience; rooms are for friends, not for levelling up.

What is free

The room, the map, the mode, the bots, the watch link and the audience room cost nothing. A paid Host Pack adds more seats than the map is drawn for, your own match length, a password on the door, reserved seats for watchers, and a link that lasts until the room has gone unused for thirty days rather than half an hour. None of it gives any seat an advantage, and the free room loses nothing without it.

Play now Free, in this tab. The button opens the game, where Play with friends makes your room.