About Screenwar
One screen, no scrolling, 9 squares fighting over it. Built in a day, in the open, because the idea would not have survived a week of planning.
Why it works this way
Pay-to-rank boards are not new. The problem with all of them is that they finish: whoever writes the biggest cheque takes the top spot, nobody can justify beating it, and the board freezes within days.
Two rules here are aimed squarely at that. A move adds 1% of a square's stake, and you get one move per square every 30 seconds. Money still matters, but it converts into position at a fixed rate no matter how much of it you have. Climbing quickly requires people, not budget.
The second is dilution. Your area is your stake over the total pot, so every new arrival makes every existing square smaller. There is no state in which standing still keeps your position. That is deliberately uncomfortable, and it is why the board is still moving on day three.
Decisions that cost something
No uploads. You never send us an image. A square shows your site’s own icon, which we fetch once from a single fixed source and store ourselves, so nothing is loaded from your server while people browse and nobody can swap an approved icon for something else afterwards. Behind it sits a ticker of one to three characters: it is what you actually claim, and it is what the square falls back to when a site has no icon. There are 18,278 possible tickers, the whole namespace was checked once up front, and none of it is classified at runtime.
The Wall. As the pot grows, a small stake buys an unreadable sliver. The strip along the bottom is fixed-size cells at a flat price that never dilute and never run out, so the board cannot become a place only well-funded companies can stand.
Colour means something. The tile is the owner's colour. The letters turn green or red depending on whether that square is gaining or losing ground against the pot — measured as a rank across the whole board, so it is never all green or all red.
Who built it
Screenwar was built by Ludovic Wipier at ZKY Solutions, a web studio that builds sites, e-commerce and internal tools for companies.
This one is a side project rather than client work, but it is built the same way the client work is: server-rendered, no ORM, hand-written SQL with numbered migrations, an append-only ledger for anything involving money, and a test suite that runs against the same database version production uses. The card details never touch the server — payment is handled entirely by Stripe's hosted checkout.
If you want something built properly rather than quickly, zkysolutions.com.
The numbers, live
- Total pot
3,564 - Squares on the board9
- Tickers that exist18,278