How to play

Wiki Wars is an auction game. You buy Wikipedia articles as cards, and your cards score the page views those articles really received. The player whose cards earned the most views wins. Multiplayer games use real historical views; practice games against bots use simulated counts.

The setup

• Between 2 and 20 players join a room. The host picks the settings.
• The game starts at a month somewhere between July 2015 and today.
• Everyone gets the same match cash: the room's total, split evenly. It's all you get for the whole game, and it disappears when the game ends.

Each round

1. Reveal. One article appears as a card, with its rarity and its views for this month.
2. Auction. Everyone bids. Each bid must beat the current top bid by at least the minimum raise. You can't outbid yourself, and you can bid everything you have.
3. Sold. The top bid wins the card and pays exactly that amount. The money leaves the game; it doesn't go to anyone. If nobody bids, the card goes unsold.
4. Time passes. History jumps ahead by the room's interval (say, six months). Every card you own collects its article's views for each of those months.

Scoring

A card scores the views its article received from the month you bought it until the end of the game, counting the month of purchase. After the last auction, history moves one more interval, so the final card gets the same run as the others before the totals are counted.

Ties go to the player with more match cash left, then to whoever joined the room first.

Last-second bids

If someone bids in the final five seconds, the clock goes back up to five seconds. Sniping doesn't work; knowing what an article is worth does. If nobody else can afford to raise, the auction ends at once.

Card rarity

Rarity compares an article's views that month with every other article in the game that month: Grey is below the median, Blue the top half, Purple the top 20%, Orange the top 5% and Gold the top 1%. Rarity is about this month only. The score is about all the months to come.

Hidden timeline

Page views are public, so in a game showing real dates you could look up an article's future mid-auction. Public games therefore hide the timeline: you see "Month 13 of 49" and rounded views (about 1.2 million) instead of the real date and exact count. The real dates are revealed on the results screen. Private rooms can choose to show them.

Articles

• An article can't come up twice in the same game.
• An article only appears in a round if it existed before that month, so you'll never bid on something that hadn't happened yet.
• Distressing topics, such as disasters and tragedies, are left out of the catalogue.

Coming with multiplayer

Teams, trading cards and cash between players, sealed-bid and turn-based auctions, votes to pause or end a game, and rewards (coins and XP) for your placement. This page will grow as they arrive.

Try a practice game against bots. No account needed.