Paintfield
Two to four painters share one field. You cannot stop, and every cell you drive over takes your colour. Nobody is ever knocked out: when the bell goes after a minute, whoever holds the most cells takes the round, and the first to two rounds takes the match.
The field
- The field is 28 cells by 28, walled on all four sides, and 784 cells in all. There is no wrapping around the edges.
- Each painter starts in a corner, three cells in diagonally, facing along the edge. The seed decides which corner each player gets, and at two players the corners are opposite each other.
- Painters move eight cells a second and never stop. You steer with the arrow keys, with W, A, S and D, or by swiping the field on a phone.
- You can turn back on yourself. There is nothing behind you to run into, so a reverse is an ordinary move here, which it is not in Snake.
- The cell you finish a tick on takes your colour, the one you started the round in included. Painting over your own colour costs nothing and changes nothing.
The round
- A round opens with a three-second countdown. Nobody moves until it has run.
- Driving into a cell a rival has painted costs you one extra tick. You still take the cell; you take it at half speed, so stealing ground is worth about half what fresh ground is worth.
- You cannot move into a wall, into the cell a painter was standing in, or into a cell another painter is entering on the same tick. Any of those and you stay where you are for that tick. A bump costs you the cell and nothing else: nobody is hurt and nobody is out.
- Everything is decided from the field as it stood before the tick, so two painters who both want one cell are both blocked and neither one wins it.
- The bell goes sixty seconds after the countdown. Whoever holds the most cells takes the round. Equal most, and the round belongs to nobody.
- Nobody is ever knocked out of a round. A player who is behind at the halfway mark is still playing, and still painting, when the bell goes.
How a game ends
- The first player to take two rounds wins the match.
- After five rounds the match stops and the most rounds wins. Level at the top is a draw.
- A player who resigns is out of the match. At two players the other one wins; at three or four the match goes on without them and they are placed last.
- Every seat is live the whole time, so the site's move deadline of five minutes is only a dead man's switch: if nothing at all happens for that long, the match is abandoned and nobody is rated. A player who leaves in the middle is covered by the bot within half a second, and forfeits their seat after losing two whole rounds away.
Worth knowing before you start
- The server runs the field and decides everything. Your turn takes effect on the next tick, an eighth of a second, and the page draws your painter moving before the answer arrives so it feels immediate.
- Paintfield needs a live connection. If your browser or network cannot open one the page says so rather than offering a game that cannot move.
- The bar above the field is the score. It moves every tick, so you can read who is ahead without counting anything.
- The last fifteen seconds are the game. Fresh ground is worth double a rival's cell for most of the round, and at the end taking their ground swings the count twice: one off theirs and one onto yours.
- Following a rival around and painting over them is a real tactic and a losing one on its own, because of the tick it costs you. It wins when you do it at the bell.
- The bot plays at one of three strengths, drawn per match from the seed: one only looks a single cell ahead, one takes the direction with the most unpainted ground in the next six, and one changes what it wants in the last fifteen seconds. All three lose concentration now and then, on purpose.
The seed decides which corner each player starts in, and nothing else: there is no food and no dice here, so a round follows entirely from the corners and the steering. It is published when the match ends, so the whole match can be replayed from the log and checked.
Paintfield terms
- A round
- One minute on a shared field, from the countdown to the bell. A match is the first to two of them, and five at the most.
- A bump
- A move refused, because a wall, a painter, or another painter wanting the same cell was in the way. You stay put for a tick. Nobody is knocked out of a round in this game.
- The bell
- The end of the round, sixty seconds after the countdown. The count at that instant is the count that decides it.