Keep.day

Keep.day is a castle siege as a daily. Every day there's a new castle, the same for everyone, and you get one army to take it with: battering rams, sword squads and archers, bought from the day's gold. You give orders while the battle is paused, then let it run, and pause again whenever you like. You win by getting men to the flag and holding it for five seconds with no defender near. Your score is the men you lost against par, like golf.

Every wall, tower and gate is built from blocks, and they come down one at a time as they're hit. Squads find their own way through whatever hole you open. The obvious plan is to ram the main gate, and it works, but there's hot oil over it and a gatehouse full of archers, so it costs most of your army. A quiet stretch of wall on the far side, with your archers clearing its top first, usually beats par. Once you're inside, stairs lead up onto the wall walk, and swords sent at the wall archers climb up to fight them.

The castles grow through the week. Monday is a small fort. By Sunday it's a Royal Keep with a moat bridged only at the gate, an inner keep around the flag with its own gate, and about three hundred men on the field. Par comes from scripted sieges the game runs when it loads, and every siege can be shared as a link that replays it exactly.

You can also defend the castle. You get a garrison budget for wall archers, guards and pots of oil, and you hold out against a scripted attack until relief arrives. On a desktop there's a Grand Siege: the same castle with about ten times the men, nearly three thousand on a Sunday.

The idea is Jeff's, after the siege battles in Lords of the Realm II (1996). It took twelve rounds of playtesting to get here. It's built with three.js, and the music and sound effects were generated with ElevenLabs. The promo above was rendered from the real game, replaying the scripted sieges that set par.