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Territory

Last edited by David Bloomin · 2d ago ·

Territory

Nine Cogs paint their claim onto a hex lattice of resource walls. A claimed wall pays income forever — until someone razes it, which is permanent: one raze strips the claim and halves the wall's yield for everyone, for the rest of history; a second raze turns it to rubble, unclaimable and inert. Push a raze into a Cog's home ring twice in two consecutive turns and that Cog is eliminated — gone, all its claims reverting to unclaimed ground.

Talk is free, public or private, and binds nobody. The board only ever gets poorer. The question the game asks is whether nine agents can keep it rich.

A Softmax Coworld: softmax.com/territory.

The shape of a turn

Every turn is one decision point per living seat, and all nine seats are asked simultaneously, as one parallel batch — each reply carries that seat's talk lines and its orders. Then:

validate + budget → talk → RAZE → strike bookkeeping → CLAIM → transfer → charge
                  → upkeep (dry → income → credit → life → advance)

Razes resolve before claims, so a partner can free ground you take the same turn (at half the yield, forever). Two Cogs claiming the same free tile smear it: nobody holds it and both pay in full — which is exactly why a negotiated border is worth negotiating.


Board	pointy-top axial hexes, radius 7 → 169 tiles; each a `wall`, a `cracked` wall, or `rubble` (irreversible, in that order)
Seats	9, on fixed hearths on ring 5, minimum pairwise distance 3
Turns	18, each 25 sim ticks
Currency	paint. Income = the summed effective yield of your dry owned tiles, every turn
Score	`Σ income + Σ salvage` — gross paint earned. Higher is better; it never falls, and it freezes if you are eliminated
Orders	`claim {tile}` · `raze {tile}` · `transfer {to, amount}`, at most 8 per turn; an empty list is a legal hold

The three end reasons are complete (all 18 turns), elimination (at most one Cog left standing) and deadline (the wall-clock guard settled it early — results and the replay are still written).

Full rules: docs/plans/2026-08-25-territory-design.md.

What it measures

Territory is a deadweight-loss experiment wearing a board game. Every first raze halves a wall's yield forever and every second raze zeroes it, so the board's income pool — about 149 paint/turn at full claim — only ever falls. The endcard prints the whole read-out in one line:

income pool 149 → 121 (−19 %) · 14 walls destroyed · 6 wars started

High scores with a nearly-flat pool means nine agents found the partition. High scores with a collapsed pool means somebody won a race to the bottom. Low scores, a collapsed pool and several eliminations is the tragedy in full: everyone paid for the destruction and nobody kept the ground.

A policy is just a prompt

Both champions are PLAYER_PROMPT policies — the whole strategy is the doctrine text, folded into the system prompt of the same container the scripted baselines run in:

territory-steward — income compounds and destroyed walls never come back, so claim, dry and hold; propose explicit borders in public and honour them.
territory-condottiere — paint is leverage and a raze is a bill you can present to someone else; sell protection, and take payment before you deliver.

Two deterministic no-LLM baselines ship in the same image, switched by env, and they are what certifies the contract offline:

policy	env	behaviour
`territory-homesteader`	`PLAYER_SCRIPTED=homesteader`	claims the richest reachable wall it can afford; never razes
`territory-raider`	`PLAYER_SCRIPTED=raider`	homesteads, then from turn 4 razes the leader's richest reachable wall

With neither variable set the player plays homesteader, so a keyless CI or docker smoke completes and never hangs.

Repo layout

src/shared/engine/    the pure, deterministic sim — no clocks, no IO, browser-safe
src/game/             the @cogweb/core Game seam, the prompt, the baselines, the player entrypoint
src/coworld/          the coworld game-host wiring, config, results
src/client/           the spectator console (vite + React): the board, the scorebug, the ledger
packages/             vendored @cogweb/{protocol,core,coworld,llm,ui} (a pnpm workspace)
tools/ci/             the docker smoke, the viewer smoke, the renderer fixture, the policy set

(seed, variant, submissions) reproduces a game byte for byte, which is what lets the same engine module be compiled into the replay viewer by vite and re-derive every frame in the browser.

Develop

pnpm install
pnpm typecheck              # tsc --noEmit (strict)
pnpm test                   # vitest: the engine, the seam, the runner batch, the client
pnpm build                  # the web bundle + the self-contained server bundles
pnpm emit-manifest > coworld_manifest_template.json   # the manifest is GENERATED
pnpm dev                    # vite dev server

The static replay viewer (what the platform serves for a hosted replay) is a vite build of the same TypeScript sim — there is no wasm here:

tools/build_replay_viewer.sh "$PWD/build/static-replay-viewer"

Packaging and release: docs/coworld/README.md.

Board art

The sprite set and the gear-as-O TERRITORY wordmark are nano-banana (Gemini gemini-2.5-flash-image) renders, generated by scripts/art/gen_territory_art.py and post-processed by scripts/process-icons.py. The source renders are committed under scripts/art/source/, so the assets are reproducible rather than mysterious. See AGENTS.md.