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Crystal Wars

A full strategy battle in under two minutes. Outsmart your rival on a crystal map that's never dealt the same twice — flood-fill territory, encircle, cut supply lines, chain-explode. Lost? Deal a new board and go again. Easy to learn, impossible to play just once.

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About the Game

Real strategy. Zero stress. One more game.

Crystal Wars is a turn-based territory strategy played on procedurally generated crystal maps. Every match deals a fresh Voronoi board — the geometry IS the strategy, and no two battles ever play out the same.

One click can flip everything: a flood-fill swallows a whole color cluster, an encirclement claims enemy land in an instant, a bomb chain redraws the map. Made a bad move? See it, learn it, deal a new board, go again — most battles are decided in under two minutes, and even a tense one rarely runs past five.

Core Mechanics

  • Flood Fill — one click captures every connected cell of the same color

  • Encirclement — wall off enemy territory and claim it instantly

  • Supply Lines — cut your opponent off from their base; isolated cells become easy prey

  • Bomb Chains — surround a bomb cell to set off chain reactions that reshape the battlefield

  • Energy Crystals — capture one, steal an extra turn

Game Modes

  • Campaign — 24 hand-crafted levels across 5 chapters, from your first capture to genuinely tricky

  • Tutorial — 6 interactive steps; you're playing in under a minute

  • Quick Game — Easy and Medium for a breezy match, Hard when you want a real fight: a genuine minimax search running on a background thread

  • Live Multiplayer — quick online matches, Blitz or Standard, with your own field settings

  • Auto-battle — sit back and watch two opponents carve up the map on their own

A Board Worth Staring At

6 crystal rendering presets — from clean Minimal to refractive Opal — and 24 color palettes in 4, 5 and 6-color tiers. Electric borders, Time Warp slow-motion, screen shake and sparkle VFX make every capture land. Preview any palette before you play.

Features

  • 24 achievements

  • 8 languages: English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch

  • A full battle in under two minutes — there's always room for one more

  • Free demo — play in your browser at play.crystalwars.io (no account, no install)

About the Developer

Crystal Wars is solo-developed by Vertex Noord: TypeScript, Canvas, and a custom crystal renderer built for this game.

Wishlisting helps a solo dev more than you'd think — thank you.