About Screenwar
One screen, no scrolling, 8 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 per minute. 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 logos. Every square is three letters. That was a design call and an operational one: dropping image uploads removed the content classifier, the OCR pass, the re-encoding, the CDN, and the whole class of attack where an approved image is quietly swapped for something else. There are only 47,988 possible tickers, so the entire namespace was checked once, by hand, and there is nothing left to moderate 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
14,044 - Squares on the board8
- Tickers that exist47,988