The Solwaris rules

A Solwaris duel fits in one sentence: each in turn, you spend action points to cast spells and movement points to move, until one of the two falls. Everything else — ranges, lines of sight, pushes, traps — is there to decide who falls first.

The board and placement

The arena is a grid seen from above. Nine maps rotate, of very different shapes and sizes — from the Vault, small and cluttered (149 playable tiles), to the Great Plain, vast and open (476). Only three kinds of tiles: free, obstacle, and void — outside the arena, or right in the field, like the Chasm’s drop and the Ring’s pit. An obstacle can cover several tiles: a wall two, a vault four.

Before the match, each player picks their starting tile inside their zone, in 25 seconds. It is not a formality: starting behind a wall, or out in the open in the middle of a lane, often decides the first exchange. Once the time is up, the game places you automatically on a free tile in the zone.

The initiative bid

The draw decides who plays first, then the other has 5 seconds to buy the initiative back. Each raise goes up by a step of 100 coins and restarts the clock for the opponent. When nobody follows any more, the last bidder plays first and alone pays the price reached. If nobody bids, the first turn is free.

Playing first is not always desirable. A class that places things (traps, charges, Automatons) often prefers to let the other come forward; a class that strikes in melee wants the opening instead. The bid is the first real tactical choice of the match.

The turn: AP and MP

A fighter starts their turn with 12 action points and 6 movement points — the base values, which some classes change: the Arcanist has 14 AP, the Clockmaker 5 MP.

• AP pays for spells. Each spell has its cost, and many have a cast limit per turn or a cooldown.
• MP pays for movement: one free adjacent tile costs 1 MP. You cannot move through walls, fighters, summons or placed charges.

You have 40 seconds per turn. Once the clock runs out, the turn passes to your opponent in whatever state it is in. In 2 vs 2, the two sides alternate: never two allies in a row.

Mobile summons play their own turn, right after their summoner’s, in 10 seconds at most: the Arcanist’s Flame elemental has AP and MP of its own, the Clockmaker’s Automaton has MP only. Inert entities — the Warrior’s Banner, the Artificer’s charges — do not take a turn: they occupy a tile and do their job.

Range and line of sight

Distance is counted in tiles, along a broken line: two tiles to the right and three upwards make a distance of five. Diagonals shorten nothing.

Every spell has a minimum and a maximum range. A minimum range of 2 or 3 forbids casting the spell on an adjacent target: the Arcanist’s Comet, for instance, cannot be cast at less than 3 tiles. Some spells also require being in a straight line — same row or same column as you.

The line of sight is a segment drawn from the centre of your tile to the centre of the target tile: if that segment crosses an obstacle — wall, hedge, crate or rock, tall or low — the spell does not fire. The void, however, does not cut sight: you can shoot over a drop. Only the scenery blocks sight — a fighter, a summon or a placed charge never cuts a line of sight, but does block passage.

An invisible fighter cannot be targeted, but an area spell cast blind still hits them. Only damage taken reveals them — neither their attacks nor their proximity; otherwise, they reappear at the start of their next turn. Their tile looks free: placing a summon or a trap on it fails, costs the caster their AP and unmasks the invisible fighter.

A few spells do without line of sight and go through walls: it says so on their card, and it is always a strength of the class, not a detail.

Damage, resistance and armour

A spell that hurts rolls its damage between a minimum and a maximum. Three things then apply:

• Critical hit: 10% chance, and the damage is multiplied by 1.5.
• Resistance: a percentage taken off the damage you receive, whether it comes from a passive (the Brute’s Rage, the Warrior’s Cuirass as a variant) or from a spell (Stoneskin). It is capped at 75% — you never become invulnerable.
• Armour: a pool of points that takes hits in place of HP and disappears when it is used up or when its duration ends. Resistance applies first: armour only absorbs what resistance has let through.

Boosting your own damage (War cry, Mage’s eye, the Brute’s Rage) and weakening the target’s resistance (Mace smash) stack. It is the most reliable way to blow through a health bar in one turn.

Two limits. Damage buffs placed by spells on the same fighter do not add up: only the strongest counts, and a passive such as Rage adds to it. And all the bonuses on a hit put together never multiply it by more than 3, critical hit not included.

Pushes, pulls and collisions

Many spells move instead of hurting — or as well as hurting. A push drives away in a straight line, a pull brings closer, a swap exchanges two tiles.

When a push is blocked by a wall, an obstacle, another entity, the edge of the arena or the void, it stops dead and the victim takes 12 damage per tile it could not travel; an entity struck takes half. This impact is a hit like any other: the caster’s damage bonuses increase it, it can be critical, and the victim’s resistance, then armour, reduce it. A few spells have their own, stronger impact, written on their sheet. Only a trap crossed on the way stops the push without an impact: it triggers instead. Pushing someone against a wall is therefore a damage spell in disguise — and pushing someone onto a trap, better still.

Two variants are a straight answer to it, the Warrior’s Anchor and the Artificer’s Diving bell: as long as they hold, nothing moves their caster any more, no push, no pull, no position swap.

AP and MP removal

Stripping points from your opponent is a form of attack in its own right. A removal is attempted point by point, and each point can be refused by the target’s resistance — every class has its own, different for AP and for MP. The Clockmaker resists AP removal well (45%), the Brute MP removal (45%), the Arcanist almost nothing (25% and 20%).

One safeguard caps it all: between two of their turns, a fighter never loses more than 4 AP or more than 4 MP, all sources combined. Beyond that, the removal no longer takes effect.

An opponent stripped of 3 MP can no longer flee; stripped of 2 AP, they will not cast their big spell. Against the classes that depend on a precise chain, it is often worth more than raw damage.

Traps

Two classes place traps — the Shade has three, plus a fourth as a variant, Evil eye; the Brute a Pit. A trap is invisible to your opponent: only the side that placed it sees it on the board.

• It goes off on anyone who enters its area, including whoever placed it, and cuts its victim’s walk short: the rest of the move is lost.
• It stays in place for 8 turns, then disappears.
• Its area depends on the trap: a cross of one tile for the Shade’s three traps, the tile and its four diagonals for Evil eye, a circle of 2 tiles for the Brute’s Pit.

An isolated trap is avoided by chance. Two traps placed side by side, or a trap placed on the one tile that restores a line of sight, go off almost for certain. And a spell that moves by force — the Shade’s Fear, a Shove, a pull — turns a trap placed at random into a sure thing.

Map pickups

On every hero turn, the ones from the previous turn disappear and two pickups appear on random free tiles, never two of the same. Both players can see them, and they go to whoever walks onto them, hero or summon — or whoever is pushed, pulled or teleported onto them. A charge or a Banner picks up nothing.

These pickups change the arithmetic of a turn: 2 more AP is one more spell. They are also bait — your opponent knows where you want to go.

Spell variants

Every class has two versions of each of its eight spells — the original and its variant — and two versions of its passive. Before the fight, in the grimoire, you pick one version per slot: you always have eight spells and one passive in hand.

• One slot, one choice. A variant takes the place of one specific spell: you cannot have both, nor put a variant anywhere else.
• Everything mixes. You can take a single variant, or all eight, with or without the variant passive.
• Locked at the start. The choice is made before the fight and no longer changes afterwards.
• Visible to all. Your opponent and the spectators see the variants you picked.
• Per class. Each class keeps its own choice from one game to the next.
• Same rules. A variant obeys the common rules: range, line of sight, resistances, AP and MP removal.

The sheet of every variant — cost, range, effect and a play tip — is on its class page: Warrior, Brute, Arcanist, Shade, Clockmaker, Artificer.

How a match ends

Three outcomes, and three only:

1. A fighter’s health drops to zero. The side with no hero standing loses — summons do not count.
2. A player forfeits.
3. The 40-turn limit is reached. The match is declared a draw. In a staked match the win then goes to whoever kept the larger share of their health: running away for forty turns does not earn a refund.

Forfeiting a match

Forfeiting — with the button, or by leaving the match and not coming back — gives the win to the opponent. Whoever forfeits earns nothing, neither XP nor coins, and their rating takes a loss, even on the first turn: leaving early does not protect you from a loss.

If the fight reached the 4th turn, the opponent keeps every reward of the fight: it isn’t their fault. Before that, the fight is too short to count: the player who stays earns no XP, no coins, no rating and no ranked-win loot from it.

Against a player, in a free duel as in a staked one, forfeits also cost time. Over a rolling 24 hours, the first is forgiven — an emergency, a dropped connection — then each forfeit imposes a break before the next match: 2 minutes for the second, 10 minutes for the third, 30 minutes beyond. Training against the AI is not affected.

Leagues and progress

The rating is calculated per class, in Elo: everyone starts at 1000 with each class, and a match moves both ratings according to the gap between them. Beating someone stronger pays a lot, beating someone weaker almost nothing. Eight leagues mark the climb, from Novice to Legend.

Training against the artificial intelligence only pays experience: no coins, no league points. Only online duels move your rating — you do not climb the league by chaining fights against bots. The Play button always looks for a human opponent anyway: if nobody turns up within 25 seconds, the game offers to face the AI while you wait, outside the league, and the search goes on as long as you do not accept.

A fight forfeited before the 4th turn earns the player who stays nothing in the league; the one who leaves loses rating as usual.

The league also counts for loot: at the end of a fight against a player, the higher the league of the class you play, the better the chance of winning a Legendary Crystal.

The leaderboard

The Leaderboard button on the home screen shows your card on the left: league, rating, position, progress to the next league and record. On the right, the table of the top hundred, all classes together or class by class, over the season (by rating) or the last seven days (by form: wins minus losses). You can search for a player by name, and “My position” jumps to your page. The Weekly boss tab shows both of the boss’s leaderboards, paid and free.

What next

The rules only tell half the game. The other half is in the classes: each has a passive that bends one of those rules in its favour, and eight spells that follow from it. Start with the one whose description speaks to you — Warrior, Brute, Arcanist, Shade, Clockmaker, Artificer.

Frequently asked questions