DotBattle Strategy Game

Two players, one grid of dots, and a board where nothing you have taken is safe until the round ends. DotBattle is an abstract strategy game about surrounding territory, and just as much about taking back what you lost.

The board and the move

The board is a grid of dots, 10 by 14 by default. On your turn you place one of your dots on any free point. It does not have to touch a dot you own, or any dot at all. The only places closed to you are an occupied point and the inside of a base your opponent has already sealed.

How you take territory

After every move the game floods the board inward from the edges, treating the dots of the player who just moved as walls. Any area the flood cannot reach counts as closed. If it holds at least one enemy dot, the whole area becomes your base and every trapped dot is captured, one point each. Your territory is recounted after each move and merged into the largest connected shape available.

Encircle the encirclement

No base is final. Seal a wall around an area that completely contains an enemy base and that base changes hands: your opponent loses the points it earned, the dots trapped inside return to the board as active dots, and the opponent's own wall dots that are now trapped are captured by you. That single rule is why a losing position stays playable to the last move.

How a round ends

A round ends when no legal move is left, when the leader's advantage can no longer be caught mathematically, or when the leader crosses the automatic win threshold, roughly 15 percent of the board turned into captures. A mercy rule closes it at 30 percent filled and a 10 dot lead, and a dead endgame at 70 percent filled with no capture for 16 straight moves. Run your clock down first and you lose the round.

Play against the AI

Three levels that behave differently, not just harder. Easy looks one move ahead and deliberately picks a weaker, random move about 40 percent of the time, so a new player can win. Medium searches two moves ahead and picks at random among several near-equal good moves, so games do not repeat. Expert searches three moves ahead, avoids formations where it would lose its own dots, and hunts for lines that take your territory.

Two players, one device

Hot seat: pass the phone or tablet across after each turn. No second device, no connection.

Set the match up your way

Before the match you set the clock, one to ten minutes per player, with a loss on timeout. You choose who starts, how many dots a player places per turn, from one to three, and the match length: first to one, three or five won rounds, tracked as you go. A short round fits a wait; a best of five with longer clocks is a proper match. Everything runs fully offline, with no account and no sign-in.

Simple rule, deep tactics

The rule takes a sentence. The consequences do not. Every dot is part of your wall and a hint about where you are going, so a strong player reads two traps at once: the one being built, and the one being built against them.

What makes it different

A dot may go anywhere, which opens the decision space far wider than grid games where you build outward from what you hold. And territory is reversible, so points are never banked, only held.

Who it is for

For players who like short board games that still demand real thinking, for anyone who wants a solo match against an opponent that genuinely calculates, and for two people sharing one device.

The board first

The presentation stays plain and readable, and you can start playing without a tutorial. The game is available in 31 languages, picked in settings independently of your system language.

Recent changes:
First production release