HOW TO PLAY

The planet is a 1000-tile grid, 20 rows by 50 columns. Territories touch on their four cardinal sides only — never diagonally — and the map wraps east to west, so the first column borders the last. The north and south rows do not wrap, so a tile up there can only ever be reached from three sides.

Your very first claim can be any grey territory. Every claim after that has to touch land you already hold, so empires grow as shapes rather than scattered dots. Claiming locks 100 BORDER into the tile and charges a 2% fee on top: 100 staked plus 2 fee leaves your wallet. The stake stays yours — it is returned in full the moment someone takes the tile from you.

An attack succeeds when your stake, multiplied by how many sides you already hold around the target, beats the defender's locked stake. Surrounding is the whole game:

• 1.00x1 side · A single border touch
• 1.15x2 sides · Pincer from two sides
• 1.35x3 sides · Three sides held
• 1.75x4 sides · Encircled — the shield is ignored

The panel always shows the defender's power, your multiplier, the minimum stake that wins and the exact total before you sign. The contract recalculates all of it — the interface can never talk it into a different answer.

A freshly taken territory is shielded for 90 seconds, so you get a moment to consolidate. The one exception: if an attacker holds all four sides, they can strike straight through the shield. Reinforcing adds stake at a 1% fee and never resets the shield. Attacking costs 5% on top of your stake. If you want out, abandoning returns your stake minus a 2% exit fee — the only fee taken out of the stake instead of charged on top. Own a tile and you can stamp a picture on that block. Lose the tile and the picture is wiped — the next holder starts blank.

Every 24 hours a fresh campaign starts. The planet is never wiped — only the leaderboard resets. Score comes from holding ground and taking it:

score = 1 x (tile-minutes held) + 25 x (enemy tiles captured) + 75 x (captures where the tile was encircled) + 50 x (pulse tiles held at epoch end)

Every 15 minutes, five pulse zones light up. They are picked by a published hash of the chain id, campaign and window — anyone can verify them, and nothing about them is random in a way you cannot check. Control points are a scoreboard only: BORDER ZERO never pays out for rank.

Every move that changes the map pays Border Tax in $BORDER. War costs the most. The only way to earn that tax back is to lock $BORDER on land.

Claim adds a 2% tax on top of the locked stake. Reinforce is 1%. Attack is 5% — war is supposed to be expensive. Abandon takes 2% out of the stake you get back. The token itself is a normal ERC-20: no transfer tax, because that would break the vault that holds everyone's land.

The next contract revision splits collected tax 40% treasury / 60% Border Levy, paid at pulse close to whoever actually has $BORDER locked on tiles. Sitting in a wallet earns nothing. Full $BORDER page.