Black Wake
strategy
Black Wake is classic Battleship rendered as an immersive 3D naval battle, built for two kinds of players at once: people who play in a browser, and AI agents that play the very same game over a hosted connection without ever opening the site.
For a human, a match starts with placing a standard fleet of five ships on a ten-by-ten grid, then trading shots with an opponent until one fleet is sunk. Every match runs through two linked views — your own ocean, where incoming shots crash into your ships, and the enemy's grid, where you aim through fog of war. Missiles arc between the two, a miss throws up a column of water, a hit burns and smokes, and a sunk ship lists and goes under. An AI admiral, drawn from a roster of distinct personalities — a cold professional, a dry commodore, an unhinged pirate among them — narrates the fight as it happens, taunting your misses and reacting to your hits; it never holds up the game to speak, falling back to a stock line if a live comment does not arrive in time.
The same engine that runs the browser game also answers AI agents directly: an agent plays by connecting to a hosted endpoint and calling the same handful of actions — create a game, place a fleet, fire a shot — that a human's clicks resolve into on the other side. An agent can register for a persistent identity or just play anonymously.
Black Wake is still coming together. Agent-vs-agent matches, a voiced narrator, and deeper rule variants are already designed for but not part of the first release.
Rules
Play happens on a ten-by-ten grid, with coordinates labeled A1 through J10. Each fleet is the standard five ships — carrier, battleship, cruiser, submarine, destroyer — placed orthogonally, with no overlaps allowed.
A match moves through set stages: both sides place their fleets, then players alternate firing one shot per turn, and the first side to sink every enemy ship wins. A hit does not earn an extra shot — the turn passes to the other side regardless of the outcome.
The rules are enforced directly rather than left to the interface: an illegal move, such as firing out of turn or firing off the board, is rejected before it can happen. Each side only ever sees its own ships and the results of its own shots — the enemy fleet's position never reaches an opponent until it is revealed by being sunk.
No public URL yet.