How to Play

Each player controls one chariot: a driver, a light, normal, or heavy chariot, and a team of four horses. Up to eight chariots — human or AI — race the same oval track over three laps. The first chariot to cross the finish line on the final lap wins; if a driver is eliminated along the way, the survivors keep racing it out.

Before the flag drops, every driver splits 4 preparation points across four areas: the driver's own skill, the chariot's handling, the team's speed, and the team's endurance. Everyone commits their split at the same time, then the results — how fast your team really is, how much endurance you're carrying, how skilled your driver turns out to be — are revealed together.

There's a real trade-off here: pouring everything into raw team speed leaves you fragile in a fight or a hard turn, while investing in endurance and driver skill pays off over a long, contested race.

Every turn has two parts. First, all drivers privately plan their move for the turn: how far they intend to travel and what they intend to do with it — race ahead, cut across lanes, or attack a rival. Everyone plans at the same time, on a short timer, so no one can react to what a rival already committed to.

Once every plan is in, the resolution order is drawn at random. Chariots then act one at a time, in that order: the acting chariot moves and can attack, while everyone else holds position — except a rival caught in an attack, who gets a brief moment to react before the turn continues.

Your team speed and driver skill set your budget of movement for the turn, and you must spend all of it. That budget can go toward moving straight ahead, changing lanes (cutting toward the inside rail costs more than drifting toward the outside), or attacking a rival chariot in an adjacent lane.

Every turn on the oval has a safe speed printed into the track itself — the faster and tighter the turn, the lower it is. You're free to enter a turn faster than that safe speed ("forcing" the turn), but it costs endurance and risks losing control.

A driver can also choose to whip their own team for a burst of extra speed mid-turn — a gamble that costs endurance and risks losing your whip if things go badly for you elsewhere in the same turn.

You can also brake, spending part of your movement to slow down instead of advancing — useful to stay under a turn's safe speed, or to peel off from an attack. And if you're ever boxed in with nowhere legal to go, your chariot is forced to skid sideways into the next lane just to get moving again.

A chariot can overturn — and is immediately out of the race — in two situations: pushing a turn faster than its safe speed and losing control, or taking enough wheel damage from a collision that the wheel finally gives out. The faster you force a turn, or the more damaged your wheel already is, the greater the risk each time it happens.

Endurance is your team's stamina, and it only ever goes down over the course of a race — there's no way to recover it once spent. It's spent whenever you force a turn, whip your team for extra speed, brake, or take a hit from certain attacks.

Run out of endurance and your options narrow sharply: no more forcing turns or whipping for speed, no more braking (even to dodge an attack), your team gradually slows down turn after turn, and your driver's own skill starts to erode for the rest of the race.

Only a chariot that's actively moving that turn can attack, and only a rival in an adjacent lane is a legal target. Each attack costs part of your movement budget, and you can strike more than once in a turn if you can afford it.

Where you strike matters: attacking near a rival's team means going after their horses, while attacking near their chariot means going after the driver or the chariot itself.

A whip attack aimed at a rival's team is a battle of nerve between the two drivers: the loser's team loses endurance, though it may also be pushed to a faster pace on its very next turn as a side effect.

A whip attack aimed at the driver themself plays out very differently each time: it might force them to brake, shove their chariot sideways into another lane, cost them speed on their next turn, wound the driver outright, or even cost the attacker their own whip if the strike is caught. A serious wound to the driver can trigger a critical injury with lasting consequences for the rest of the race.

Ramming a rival's horses risks injuring the animal closest to you — a wounded horse immediately slows that team down, and a horse injured badly enough goes down entirely, leaving the chariot stuck until the driver can free it from the team.

Ramming a rival's chariot risks damaging one or both chariots involved, landing on whichever wheel sits closest to the collision. A heavier chariot hits harder; a lighter one hits softer. Enough damage to a wheel forces an immediate risk of overturning.

When you're attacked, you get a brief window to choose how to respond: hold your course and take the attack as it comes, brake to fall back out of range at the cost of endurance, or dodge into an open lane. Whether brake or dodge actually succeeds depends on a quick contest of nerve against your attacker — win it and you get clear, lose it and you're forced to hold anyway.

The race runs three laps. The first chariot to cross the finish line on the final lap takes the win; if two chariots would finish on the very same turn, whichever one still has more unused movement left over takes it.