FAQ
What Islanders is, what it needs from you, and what it does when things go sideways. Money questions are on the pricing page.
A multiplayer settlement-building game for three to six players: a hex island, five resources, two dice, trade with the table, build roads and towns, race to ten points.
The part that is different is that all of that is editable. Ten points or seven, two six-sided dice or two eight-sided ones, nineteen wool in the bank or ten. The standard game is the default configuration, not a special case in the code.
Not to play. You type a nickname, press Create game, and send the four-letter code to your friends. Your name and your seat are remembered in your browser, so a refresh puts you back at the table.
Accounts exist for one reason: a subscription has to belong to someone. Only a host who subscribes signs in. The people at their table never do.
Three to six. Five- and six-player tables use the larger board and a special build phase between turns, which matches how the physical extension handles the same problem.
Yes. The 3D board renders on a phone and the interface collapses into a touch layout. There is also a flat 2D board, one click away in the top corner of the board, for anything that would rather not run WebGL.
It was built desktop-first. A six-player game with a lot of trading is more comfortable on a laptop.
No, and that is deliberate. The configuration is frozen when the host starts the game and stamped into the game record, so everyone at the table is playing the same rulebook and the replay afterwards means something.
Rules can still bend the numbers while the game runs — that is what a rule like Leader’s Burden does when it drops the discard limit by one for whoever is ahead. The difference is that the rule doing it was agreed before anyone rolled.
You can write one that makes the game strange. Breaking it is harder. Rules are validated when you save them, so an unknown field or a type error is refused in the editor rather than at ten past midnight.
Rules can trigger other rules, so cascades are capped: eight levels deep and sixty-four firings per action, after which the chain halts with a visible warning instead of hanging the table. Expressions run through a parser written for this — no eval, no loops, no way to reach anything outside the game state.
There is also a stalemate valve. You can end a game on points after a set number of scoreless turns, which exists because a simulated Chaos Night ran to turn 1105 with every city built and nobody able to earn a point back.
The server. It holds the real game state, validates every action, and sends each seat only what that seat is allowed to see. Hands and unplayed development cards are always hidden from everyone else.
An illegal action comes back with a reason, and the buttons you cannot press are greyed out with theirs attached — "Needs 1 brick".
They can rejoin the same seat from the same browser, and by default the game simply waits for them. The host can choose otherwise before the game starts: pass a disconnected player’s turn after a grace period, or put a clock on every turn.
When the server does move a game on, anything the missing player owed resolves automatically — random discards, no steal, the robber left where it is — and their turn ends. It never touches a prompt owed by anyone else.
Not at the table. There is a bot in the codebase that plays complete games, and it is how the preset rules get tested — it plays hundreds of games per ruleset and reports win rates, stalls and rule firings. Adding it as a seat you can fill in the lobby has not been done.
The action log is, so a finished game can be replayed and scrubbed turn by turn. Replays only open once the game is over, because the log contains what was in everybody’s hand.
In your browser, under a name you choose. A ruleset also exports as a JSON file, which is how you move one to another machine or send it to a friend, who can import it straight into their lobby.
No. It is an independent game, built by one person, not sponsored by or endorsed by any publisher. Hexes, resources, trading and settlements are a decades-old genre; the configuration system and the rule engine here are their own thing.