How Turf War works
Two squads of three paint a 55-tile island and the side holding more tiles at the buzzer pays 1.9x. Overtime, tiebreaks and the three Drops.
Turf War is squad against squad: "Two squads. Paint the map." You pick a squad, not a single fighter, and if it holds more of the island at the buzzer your pick pays 1.9x, stake included, so 100 comes back as 190.
How a battle plays
Each squad has three crew, two runners and a blaster, on a hex island of 55 tiles. A battle lasts 41 seconds, or 45 with overtime. Standing on a tile paints it in that squad's color. A tile with both squads on it doesn't change hands.
Blasters lob paint balls that tag enemies. A tagged crew member pops and drops back onto their squad's pad 2 s later.
Enemy paint in a squad's own half comes off faster the closer it is to that squad's pad. This home-turf rule means a squad that gets pushed back wins ground back quickly.
Which crew member runs and which one blasts is dealt by the round's seed, so both squads start at 1 in 2.
How the winner is decided
Turf War runs on a clock, with 41 seconds of regulation. At the buzzer:
- If the squads are more than 5 tiles apart, the squad with more tiles wins.
- Within 5 tiles, the match goes to 4 seconds of overtime and the card says "Overtime! Four more seconds". The squad with more tiles after that wins, and the result says "Won in overtime".
- Level on tiles after overtime goes to the squad with more tags, for example "Level on the map, won on tags 7–5".
- Still level, a coin flip drawn from the round's seed decides it, and the result says "Dead level, won on a coin flip".
A tie never voids a Turf War round.
Drops in Turf War
A Drop here lands on a whole squad. It's at full strength with 17 seconds or more left in the period and shrinks to 25% of that at the buzzer. Overtime is its own short period, so a Drop there lands smaller.
| Drop | Kind | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Reinforcements | Speed | A drop pod lands an extra runner for up to 5 s and splats the tile it lands on. |
| Rally | Shield | For up to 3 s, the squad can't be tagged, moves 15% faster and paints 20% faster. |
| Airstrike | Chaos | Up to 7 of the squad's tiles in its densest patch go back to sand, and its crew within 2.6 m are stunned for up to 1.6 s. |
The server picks which Drop you get and which squad it hits. Prices and limits are on how Drops work.
What the scoreboard shows
The plate at the top has each squad's faces at the ends and its share of the map in the middle, like "45% – 53%". The bar under it is the map split, and the gap between the colors is unpainted ground.
The plate moves with every tile, but the lead is only called once a squad holds 3 tiles more than the other. That's when the LEAD CHANGE call goes up and the crown hops across. The line under the title works the same way. It reads "Neck and neck" until a squad is 3 tiles clear, then "Orbit leads the map" until the map is level again or the other squad is 3 clear, so a lead that wobbles by a tile or two doesn't flip it back and forth.
