Tactical Board · Master Edition · 9×9 · Field Rules v34.0
Two hidden
pieces.One flag.
Eighteen soldiers a side, all face up but two. Somewhere in those three rows sits your Flag — and the Bomb that looks exactly like it. Everything else is rank, ground and nerve.
01 · The ground
Nine rows. One trench. Two Command Centres.
Both armies deploy in their own three rows, behind the wire. Between them lies open ground, and across the middle of it row 5, the trench — anything may cross it, but infantry that starts a turn inside it can run its whole length in one move.
The deepest row of each base is a Command Centre, lit amber. It is the square the whole game is played for: walk your Flag onto the enemy's and you win on the spot. Walk a Private onto it and it takes a field commission — General, Spy, or Bomb.
Deployment: Standard · Strategy (Twin Bastion, Citadel, Gauntlet, Rampart) · Free Layout
Rows 1–3 allied base · row 5 the trench · rows 7–9 enemy base
02 · The two secrets
One of them ends the game. The other ends whoever finds it.
Every army hides exactly two pieces: the Flag and the Bomb. They sit face down, identical, and nothing on the board tells them apart. Attack the Flag and you win. Attack the Bomb and you are both removed.
Once a game you may trade the two squares, however far apart they are — so the piece your opponent has spent ten moves cornering may not be the one standing there any more.
Tap a shield to turn it over.
Two face-down squares. One is the colours.
03 · Play your way
Across a table, against the machine, or neither.
One screen, one board
The board turns to whoever is moving, and each player's hidden squares stay their own. Built for a phone passed across a table — or the physical set it was designed for.
Recruit, Veteran, Tactical
Three opponents that differ in how far ahead they look, not in how much they cheat. Tactical searches to its clock, opens from a book, and never sees your face-down pieces.
Tactical against itself
Sit both seats out and let two Tacticals play. Pause at any point, step one move at a time, and read the log explaining why each piece went where it did.
04 · Learn it
Five minutes, on a live board.
The Field Manual is not a rulebook to read. Every rule is a drill you play on the real 9×9 board: march a Private, traverse a General, hop a Spy, trade the covert squares, gank, avenge, deliver the colours. 42 drills, each one refusing anything but the move it teaches.
The rules that carry conditions — a gank, a vengeance — are stepped through one condition at a time, so you can see what has to be true before the board will let you do it.
Six zones, tap to read the ground.
March, traverse, hop, swap.
The circle, played out move by move.
Take it, deliver it, or overrun it.
The colours are in one of two squares.
Nothing else on the board is hidden. That is the whole game.