Your first hour: an instant game from start to finish

What you start with

Press Play now and the game makes you a guest player with a random nickname. No email, no password. You can change the nickname with the button at the top of the screen.

Your village is already grown: a Town Hall at level 20, Barracks at 15, a Stable at 10, a Smithy at 20 and a Wall at 10, plus an Academy, a Market and strong resource buildings. You have 20,000 each of wood, clay and iron, and every unit the Smithy researches is already researched.

The army waits at home: spearmen 50, axemen 100, light cavalry 30, scouts 5 and hetmans 1. A short tutorial shows you where to find them. For the first 10 minutes you are under beginner protection: no player can attack you, and you can attack only barbarians.

Your first conquest

Grey villages on the map belong to barbarians. In an instant game their loyalty starts at 15, and every hetman who survives a winning attack lowers loyalty by 20 to 35. So a single hetman is enough to take one.

Open the map, click the nearest barbarian village and check the distance. Then go to the Rally Point and send one attack with the hetman and a good escort of axemen together. The axemen fight, the hetman survives behind them, and the village changes hands the moment the attack lands.

Clear the defenders first. Most barbarian villages have no troops at all, but a village a player has left behind keeps its army and its wall, and a hetman in a lost battle dies with everyone else. If the map tells you nothing about a village, send your scouts first.

Do not leave a long gap between the first visit and the hetman. Loyalty starts growing back from the moment anyone's troops first reach a barbarian village, and at this speed it climbs quickly. A hetman who comes with the very first attack meets the lowest loyalty there is.

The rest of the hour

A hetman is used up when he takes a village, so the next one has to be trained in the Academy. Each hetman needs coins: as many as you have villages, plus as many as the hetmans you already own. A coin costs 28,000 wood, 30,000 clay and 25,000 iron, and the hetman has his own price on top.

Your main village produces a lot, but not enough to mint coins every few minutes. Light cavalry fill the gap: send them at the barbarian villages around you, and use the Assistant to repeat the raids quickly. Loot pays for coins, coins pay for hetmans, and hetmans bring villages.

The level of the Academy limits how many hetmans a village holds at once, counting the ones on the road. Raise it if you want to send more than one at a time.

Keep an eye on the Rally Point as well. Once your protection ends, players and bots can attack you, and the villages you take start out weak: every building loses levels, and there are no troops in them.

How the game ends

An instant game ends after 60 minutes, or earlier when one player holds 60% of all the villages on the map. Bots cannot end the game early this way, but they do appear in the final ranking: when time runs out, whoever has the most points wins, human or bot.

When the game is over, the results page shows the leaderboard with each player's points, villages and conquests. The page stays, so you can come back to it later.

You can keep everything you did. Press Create account at any time during the game, choose a name and a password, and your guest becomes a full player with the same village, the same game and the same tally of games. An account also opens the long worlds. Guests nobody has seen for 30 days are deleted, together with their history.

You can also leave early. Leave world ends your game, and your villages go to the barbarians.