Neither of them can see your ranks. They are handed exactly the same view you are.
Everything on this screen is arithmetic on the pieces lying face up beside the board.
The rules take two minutes. The one idea underneath them is what people play for thirty years.
Forty pieces: one Marshal (10), one General (9), two Colonels (8), three Majors (7), four Captains (6), four Lieutenants (5), four Sergeants (4), five Miners (3), eight Scouts (2), one Spy (1), six Bombs and one Flag.
One square up, down, left or right — except a Scout, which runs any distance in a straight line. Bombs and the Flag never move. Nothing enters the lakes.
Move onto an enemy piece and both turn face up. The higher rank wins; equal ranks kill each other. Three exceptions, and they are the game:
· A Miner attacking a Bomb defuses it. Anything else attacking a Bomb dies.
· A Spy that attacks the Marshal wins. The Marshal attacking the Spy wins — the Spy's advantage is the ambush, not the man.
· Take the Flag and the game is over.
And it is not the Flag either. This is free, it is public, and it is most of what separates somebody who has played ten games from somebody who has played one. This board draws a small dot on every enemy piece that has ever moved, because you would have seen it happen and there is no reason to make you hold forty of those in your head.
The reverse matters just as much: a cluster of pieces that have never moved, deep in their own rows, is where the Flag is.
A Scout is worth almost nothing and can run the length of the board. Spending one to find out that a square is a Colonel is a trade, and a good one. Players who hoard their Scouts and attack with Captains are throwing away the only cheap information in the game.
When your Marshal takes a Sergeant, you have gained six points and announced where the most valuable piece on the board is — to somebody who has a Spy. Attack with the cheapest thing that will do the job.
Ring your Flag with Bombs on every side and you have drawn an arrow pointing at it: no piece needs to be that well defended. Three is usual. And keep your Miners — they are the only thing that can clear a Bomb, and a player with no Miners left cannot win against a Flag that has any.
The deployment you are given here is already a decent one — Flag off centre on the back row, three Bombs around it, the Spy near the Marshal, Scouts forward. Tap 🎲 for a fresh one, or tap any two of your squares to swap those pieces round. The four or five you actually care about are worth moving by hand.
One phone is the board and reads out four letters; the other types them. Each phone is sent only its own army — not the whole game with the enemy ranks hidden in the interface, but a message that does not contain them. A check in the repository proves it by shuffling the unseen ranks and requiring the message to come back identical.
The machine opponents get the same treatment, and it is not a courtesy: they are handed a view, not the game, so they cannot read a rank they have not been shown. It is a stronger promise than promising not to look.