Splinter States
Spin the wheel. Bet on the war. Paint the map.
A spin-based conquest game on today's world map. Countries go to war, an initiative wheel decides who strikes, and you wager tickets on who walks away with the provinces.
- Every admin-1 region on Earth is a province, built from Natural Earth data with present-day borders.
- Pick a campaign scope (world, continent or region) and buy a favorite country. Prices scale with strategic value, not just size.
- Double-or-nothing betting on individual wars, with a ticket economy that is both your wallet and your score.
- Formation rules let winners become something new: a Revived USSR, the Ottoman Porte, a Persian Empire, a Greater Indian Union.
- Only the United States and China start as Empires. Everyone else has to earn it.
How a round works
Every campaign runs the same loop:
scope -> favorite -> event horizon -> matchmaking -> war selection -> betting -> combat
You choose how big the war is: the whole world, one continent or one region. That choice locks which countries are in play and where the camera stops. Then you buy a campaign favorite. Hover a province to see its details, click to pick the country that controls it. A country's price scales with its strategic value, population and area, so a large country with a lot of empty land does not get to be cheap and powerful at once.
The wheel
Wars are not resolved by a hidden dice roll. An initiative wheel, drawn live on a canvas, spins to decide who strikes. You can watch it, and you can bet on it.
Tickets
Tickets are your wallet and your score. Before combat you can wager on individual wars: call the winner and you double your stake, miss and you lose it. Going broke does not end the campaign. It just makes the next betting window a lot more uncomfortable.
Becoming something else
Countries are tracked by more than the land they hold. Each one remembers what it has absorbed and which governments it has swallowed along the way. When a winner annexes a rival, it checks formation rules that work like a mission tree:
- Middle Eastern powers can form a New Islamic Caliphate.
- Kazakhstan or Russia can proclaim a Revived USSR.
- Morocco can chase Andalusia through Iberia, or a North African Empire across the Maghreb.
- Iran can become the Persian Empire, Turkey can restore the Ottoman Porte, and South Asian powers can form a Greater Indian Union.
Governments matter too. Communism, caliphates, democracies, aristocracies and revolutionaries each bring their own colors and their own rebels, so a conquest can split into an ideological civil war. Provinces caught in the worst of it are incinerated and stay dead for the rest of that war.
Built with
Next.js and TypeScript, with Zustand for state that changes many times a second. The map is SVG, one path per province, and the wheel is Canvas. Simulation randomness is deterministically seeded, so every client sees the same war, which is what multiplayer will need.