How it works
The board redraws as you change it. Change the tile counts and it re-deals. The seed is shown, so you can re-roll the island until you like it, or keep the number and play the same island again next week.
A config the engine cannot run keeps the Start button off, with the reason written beside it — “Fix 2 config errors” — and the offending tab flagged. A config that is merely odd, like more tiles than number tokens, gets a warning and your benefit of the doubt.
Ready-made configurations to start from — 6 of them, the standard game among them. Save any ruleset in this browser under a name, or export it as JSON and send it to someone.
When
Pick a trigger from a grouped list: a roll, a settlement built, a road built, the robber moved, a trade completed, a monopoly played, a turn starting or ending, a development card bought, an award gained. Every trigger carries its own details — the road event knows whether it ran parallel to an opponent’s and whether it cut one in half.
If
Optional, and a tree rather than a line: all of these, any of these, not this. Compare a value from the event, from a player, from the board or the bank, against a number or another value. “The tile is wool” and “its owner is holding more than seven cards” are two rows.
Then
An ordered list of effects: grant or take victory points, give, take or steal cards, move or lift the robber, swap a number token, change a tile, skip or add a turn, draw a development card, forbid trading for two turns, bend a config value temporarily, announce something in the log. Each one names who it hits — the actor, everyone, everyone except the actor, the leader, last place, whoever has most or least of something, or a player at random.
Under every card is a sentence generated from it, rebuilt as you edit. For the Parallel Road Tax it currently reads: When a road is built, if event.wasParallel is true, the player loses 1 victory point(s) — at most 2 times.
It is not literature. But if the sentence does not say what you meant, the rule does not do what you meant — and the same sentence is what players see in the game.
Once per turn, once per game, once per player, at most N times, or on a cooldown. Rules can set off other rules, so cascades stop at eight levels deep and sixty-four firings per action with a visible warning. Expressions go through a parser written for this — no eval, no loops, and unknown names are refused when you save, not at midnight.
Rules export and import as JSON, and the shipped presets load as editable copies — take Robin Hood, change “most cards” to “most victory points”, keep it. Every preset, listed →
It lives in the Board tab. You get a flat hex map you can pan and zoom, a tool palette beside it, and a ring of faint empty hexes around whatever land exists. Pick a terrain and click one of those to paint a tile there; the Erase tool takes one away. There is no fixed outline, so a long thin island is just a lot of painting — or start from a shape: the classic 19, a 37-hex big board, a tall strip, a wide strip, two islands, an atoll, a cross.
The token tool puts a number on a tile. Auto-number fills the whole map in one press, and then you fix the two you disagree with. The port tool puts a harbour on a coastline edge: 2:1, 3:1 or 4:1, for one resource or any.
Beside the map, a stats panel holds what you have painted against what the config asked for — seven ore wanted, five placed — and lists what looks wrong: red numbers touching, land tiles with no token, a port facing land, an island split in two. None of it stops you. A board with three 8s might be the house rule.
Maps import and export as JSON, the same as rulesets.
Buttons you cannot press are greyed out with the reason attached — “Needs 1 brick” — and the server sends a reason back for anything it refuses.
Every house rule at the table is listed in the game in plain English, so nobody has to ask the host what Tithe does halfway through turn fourteen.
The rule’s row pulses the moment it fires and the log records it, so a score that drops by one arrives with its explanation. Temporary bends — “roads cost no lumber for two turns” — are listed too.
When the host presses Start, the configuration is frozen and stamped into the game record. Nobody can change a cost, a rule or a victory condition while the game runs — which is the only way six people agree to play a rulebook one of them invented that afternoon.
The server, not your browser, holds the real state and checks every action, and each seat is only sent what it is allowed to see. Every action is appended to a log, so a dropped connection rejoins where it left off, a server restart rebuilds the game exactly, and when it is over the whole thing replays turn by turn.
Questions this page did not answer are probably on the FAQ.