TILE DOMINION

◣  NEON TERRITORY WARFARE  ◢

Player guide, rules, and installation

Tile Dominion is a single-screen arcade-strategy game in which you fight three to six AI rivals for control of a glowing grid that is actively trying to kill all of you. Every tile you cross becomes yours. Every region you enclose snaps to your color. The board collapses inward on a timer. Rounds last two to five minutes and are easy to learn, brutal to master, and engineered for the next-run reflex.

THE PITCH  Paint the board. Trap your rivals. Outlast the collapse. Repeat until your reflexes are smoke.

The Game

What you're looking at

A 14×14 grid of tiles sits at the center of a dark arcade frame. Your hex-shaped avatar glows cyan. Three to six enemies — magenta, orange, green, yellow, purple, red — patrol the corners. Power tiles pulse in rotating diamond shapes. The outer ring of the board flashes orange when it's about to collapse.

Every tile on the grid has an owner. Neutral tiles are dim. Owned tiles glow in their owner's color and pulse with a subtle highlight. Blocked obstacles look like pinstriped concrete. Collapsed tiles are dead black with a red X. The HUD across the top tracks your score, your combo multiplier, the percentage of the active board you currently own, and a countdown to the next collapse.

What you're doing

You move one tile at a time. Whatever tile you step onto becomes yours — even if it belonged to an enemy a second ago. You cannot stand still and survive: the board shrinks every 9 to 18 seconds depending on mode and round, the outer ring vanishes, and anything caught outside the new boundary dies.

So you push outward to claim ground, then close the loop to capture entire pockets at once. You bait enemies into corners. You grab a Freeze tile, sprint around four enemies, and snap the noose shut for a four-trap combo. You teleport out of a doomed corner with a quarter-second to spare. You watch the score number climb and the multiplier hit x8.

Rules

Movement and capture

1.   Use WASD or the arrow keys to move one tile in any of the four cardinal directions.

2.   Each move stamps your color on the destination tile. Stepping onto an enemy's tile flips it back to yours and earns extra points.

3.   You cannot move onto a blocked obstacle, a collapsed tile, or any tile outside the active (un-collapsed) play area.

4.   If you have no legal move, you die.

Enclosure capture

This is the heart of the game. After every move — yours or an enemy's — the engine runs a flood-fill check. Any contiguous region of non-owned tiles that is completely walled in by your color, with no path to the active boundary, is captured automatically. Every tile inside that pocket flips to yours, and any enemy standing inside the pocket is destroyed on the spot.

WHY IT MATTERS  A single move that closes a loop can flip dozens of tiles and trap multiple enemies at once. This is where the score really lives.

The collapsing board

• A countdown timer in the top-right HUD shows the seconds until the next collapse.

• When it hits zero, the entire outer ring of the active area collapses simultaneously and becomes permanently impassable.
• The boundary flashes orange for the last three seconds — that is your warning.
• Anyone — you or an enemy — caught outside the new boundary at the moment of collapse dies.
• Each collapse pushes the play area smaller and the round-clear bonus closer. When the active area shrinks below 3×3, the round ends with a 2,000-point DOMINATION bonus and the next round starts on a fresh 14×14 board with smarter enemies and a faster timer.
• Expanders spread their territory outward and grab power tiles when convenient.
• Hunters chase you. They bias their move selection toward closing distance with the player.
• Trappers circle your territory and try to wall you in for an enclosure capture of their own.
• An enemy moves onto your tile.
• An enemy closes an enclosure that contains you.
• You are caught outside the boundary when the board collapses.
• You have no legal move.
• A modern desktop or laptop browser. Tested on current Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.
• A keyboard. The game expects WASD or arrow-key input.
• Audio output (optional but recommended). The procedural synthwave loop and SFX use the Web Audio API.
• That's the entire list. No GPU requirements, no npm install, no internet connection after the initial download.
• No sound: Click anywhere on the page first. Browsers block the Web Audio API until the user interacts with the page. Clicking a mode button counts.
• Choppy framerate: Close other tabs (especially video calls and streaming). The game targets 60 FPS but every renderer competes for the main thread.
• Tiny canvas: The board scales to 92% of the smaller window dimension. Maximize the window or zoom out (Ctrl/Cmd + minus).
• Keyboard not responding: Click the page once to give it focus. Some browsers don't auto-focus on file:// pages.
• Blank screen: Open the developer console (F12). The game has no external dependencies, so any error is immediately visible there.
• Don't try to enclose on round one. Just learn how the collapse rhythm feels.
• Hug your own territory in a thick blob, not a thin line. Thin lines die to a single enemy crossing.
• If you see a Freeze tile, prioritize it above everything except immediate survival.
• The combo timer is half a second. Plan your moves in pairs.
• Enclose tight pockets early to bank guaranteed score, then push outward.
• Treat the collapse timer as your move clock. Every collapse should leave you in a better tactical shape than the previous one.
• Bait hunters into corners and snap the loop. A trapped hunter is worth ten captured neutrals.
• Don't waste Teleport on convenience. Save it for genuine death situations.
• Every round-clear bonus is 2,000 points. That's bigger than most enclosures. Optimize for surviving collapses, not for max territory.
• Enemies spawn in the corners. Capture the center first and let them collide with each other on the perimeter.
• Shock is the only power that can kill an enemy outright without an enclosure. Use it on hunters who are mid-chase, not on isolated tiles.

Combos

Captures within half a second of each other build a combo multiplier. The multiplier starts at x1.0 and climbs by 0.15 per fast capture, capped at x8.0. Pause for more than half a second between captures and the multiplier resets. Your best combo of the run is shown on the game-over screen.

Power tiles

Power tiles spawn periodically on neutral ground. Walk over one to pick it up — only the player can use them. Each power awards a one-time score bonus and applies its effect immediately.

Tile	Symbol	Effect
Speed	»	Doubles your movement rate for 6 seconds. Ideal for aggressive land-grabs and outrunning hunter enemies.
Freeze	❄	Stops every enemy on the board for 4 seconds. Use it to set up a perfect trap.
Shock	⚡	Detonates a diamond-shaped blast that wipes enemy tiles within a 2-tile radius and kills any enemy adjacent to you.
Fortress	■	Converts the eight tiles around you to your color and projects a glowing shield for 8 seconds.
Teleport	◊	Warps you to a safe random tile far from any enemy. Your get-out-of-jail card.

Enemy AI

Three enemy personalities cycle through the roster:

Every enemy avoids tiles that are about to collapse, prefers neutral and player tiles over its own, and gets meaningfully smarter every round (intelligence climbs from 0.5 to 0.92 as rounds progress, which scales how much randomness sneaks into their decisions).

Death conditions

Thrills

The combo cascade

Spend the first ten seconds of a round feeling like nothing is happening. Then you notice you've drawn a near-rectangle around half the board. One more tile and the loop closes. The combo timer is alive. You step. The flood-fill triggers. Eighty tiles flip cyan in a single frame. Three enemies vanish in a triple-PERFECT-TRAP. Your score skips past four digits. The screen shakes. The bassline thumps. You are now playing at x6.5 and you have nine seconds before the next collapse.

The Freeze-Trap setup

Pick up a Freeze. Every enemy on the board locks in place for four seconds. You now have four seconds to draw a containment shape around as many of them as possible. This is the highest skill ceiling moment in the game and also the most satisfying one — there is nothing like watching four motionless enemies disappear in a single chained capture.

The collapse sprint

Two seconds left on the collapse timer. You're at the wrong corner of the board. The boundary is flashing orange. A hunter is between you and safety. You burn a Speed tile, slip past on a side route, and clear the fold-line a quarter-second before the outer ring goes dark behind you.

The teleport read

A trapper has executed a perfect encirclement. Your territory is about to be flipped wholesale. You have two moves before the loop closes. You step toward the only unblocked side, draw the trapper's pursuit, then trigger Teleport and reappear behind their lines. Their enclosure now contains nothing of yours. You proceed to mug them from the rear.

Challenges

Every move costs you something

Pushing into new ground means leaving old ground undefended. An enemy can flip a tile of yours just as fast as you can flip one of theirs, and three enemies pulling in three directions will out-tile you on raw arithmetic if you don't trap. Pure expansion loses. You have to enclose.

The board is shrinking faster than you think

The collapse interval drops by ~0.8 seconds per round and starts mode-dependent (Blitz starts at 9 seconds). By round five of Blitz you have roughly five seconds between collapses. There is no time to plan. There is only time to read.

The AI gets smarter

Round one enemies wander. Round eight enemies cut off your retreat, prioritize your power tiles, and form pincer movements with each other. Hunters close on you. Trappers slip behind you. Expanders own all the corners by the time you turn around.

Chaos mode breaks your plans

In Chaos mode, random tiles brick themselves into obstacles roughly twice every five seconds. The path you scouted is gone. The enclosure you started might now be unclosable. Adapt or die.

There is no defense

Fortress is the closest the game has to a defensive tool, and it lasts eight seconds. Every other power, every other strategy, is fundamentally aggressive. Standing still is fatal. The only winning play is forward.

THE CORE TENSION  You cannot get points without territory. You cannot keep territory without enclosing it. You cannot enclose without exposing yourself. Every choice is the wrong one and you have half a second to make it.

Scoring

The score in the top-left HUD updates live. The game-over screen breaks down your final score, territory percentage, round reached, total enemies trapped, best combo, and survival time.

Action	Reward
Capture a neutral tile	10 points × current combo multiplier
Steal an enemy tile	30 points × combo (with sparkle particle burst)
Enclose a region	50 points per tile inside × combo (auto-paints the whole pocket)
Trap an enemy in your enclosure	+500 points and a PERFECT TRAP popup
Pick up a power tile	200–300 points plus the power's effect
Survive to next round	+2000 DOMINATION bonus on round clear; +500 per round on game-over
Survival time	+5 points per second alive (tallied at game over)

Game Modes

Mode	How it plays
Classic	Standard collapse cadence (~18s, scaling down by round). The default rhythm — methodical territory war with room to breathe.
Blitz	Collapse interval halved (~9s). The board eats itself before you can think. Pure adrenaline.
Chaos	Random tiles brick themselves into obstacles mid-round. Every plan has an expiration date.

Controls

Input	Action
W A S D  /  Arrow Keys	Move one tile in the chosen direction. Holding a key auto-repeats at your current movement rate.
P  /  Esc	Pause and resume.
Mouse click on menu	Pick a mode, restart, return to menu, resume.

Installation

Tile Dominion ships as a single self-contained HTML file. Everything — the rendering engine, the procedural synthwave audio, the AI, the particle system — is inlined. There are no external assets, no CDN dependencies, no build step, no installer. The game does not need to be "installed" in the traditional sense; it just needs a modern browser to open it.

Requirements

Quick start (the only steps that actually matter)

1.   Save the file tile_dominion.html anywhere on disk.

2.   Double-click it. The browser opens and the title screen appears.

3.   Click one of the three mode buttons (Classic, Blitz, or Chaos). The first click also unlocks the audio context — that's why audio kicks in only after you press a button, not on page load.

4.   Play. Press P or Esc to pause. Restart from the game-over screen or return to the main menu.

Optional: serve over a local web server

Opening the file directly with file:// works in every browser tested. If you want to serve it over HTTP for any reason — for example, to embed it in an iframe or share it on a local network — any static server will do:

# Python 3 (built into macOS / most Linux distros)

python3 -m http.server 8000

Then open http://localhost:8000/tile_dominion.html in the browser.

# Node.js (if you have it installed)

npx serve .

Troubleshooting

Uninstallation

Delete the file. There is nothing else to clean up — no registry entries, no settings folder, no save data. (High scores live in memory only and are lost on refresh, by design.)

Strategy Tips

For your first ten runs

Once you're surviving past round three

Once you're hunting domination bonuses

Closing

Tile Dominion is engineered to fail you faster every round and to make you want one more run anyway. The board is small. The rules are four bullets long. The depth lives in the interaction between movement timing, enclosure geometry, and the collapse clock — and it doesn't run out.

HAVE FUN  You'll know you've internalized the game when you stop counting tiles and start reading shapes. That's when the real score curve begins.