jcoffey-dev
49feff0e58
Forty-two territories grouped from Natural Earth's public-domain outlines, the classic eighty-three links, exact dice odds, escalating card sets, and five bots that play every seeded game through to a winner.
2.9 KiB
Notice, credits and provenance
What this is
An independent reimplementation of the classic game of world domination, written from scratch in TypeScript in 2026: one human against five computer players, in one sitting.
The name
It isn't called what you'd expect, and that's deliberate. The rules of a game are ideas rather than expression, and nobody gets to fence them off, so they're rebuilt here freely. The name is a live trademark belonging to a company that enforces it, and this ships on a public site with somebody's name in the footer. So the mechanics are exact and the vocabulary is ours. World Conquest is what the game was called when it was first published, in French, as La Conquête du Monde.
None of that is a copyright question. Game mechanics are ideas. Names are a trademark question, which is about whether a reader would think this came from the trademark holder. Calling it World Conquest answers that, and costs the game nothing.
The same goes for the cards. The published game draws a soldier, a horseman and a cannon. The rules only need three kinds, fourteen of each, so here they're named for what they are and drawn as plain shapes.
The map
The outlines are from Natural Earth, 1:50m cultural vectors, admin-0 countries and admin-1 states and provinces:
- https://www.naturalearthdata.com/, public domain
Being public domain, they carry no license terms of their own. They're credited
here anyway, because somebody drew the world properly and that deserves saying.
tools/map.py reads them and writes src/game/board.json.
The grouping is ours: which countries and provinces make up each of the forty-two territories, where the board's line down the Urals falls, and which pieces are left off the map. So are the projection, the simplification and every color drawn on top.
The topology, which territory borders which, is the classic board's. It's
a fact about a published game, typed out by hand in src/game/map.ts and
checked against itself.
What is ours
Everything else: the rules engine, the odds, the bots and their reasoning, the interface, the sound effects and the music, and every word on screen.
License
Copyright (C) 2026 John Coffey.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE.
AGPL rather than plain GPL because this is served over a network. Section 13 means anyone who runs a modified copy of this for other people over a network has to offer them its source.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
None of the above is legal advice.