BANNERET

You never move a knight.

You plant a banner. Every knight on the field charges it at once, in a straight line, and does not stop until something stops them.

One rule, and it cuts both ways

Momentum kills. A charge that never started is a death.

• A knight that has covered at least one tile tramples any pike in its path and rides straight through it — several in a single charge, if they are in line.
• A knight that covered zero tiles and ends beside a pike still standing is killed.
• So you cannot break a pike you are standing next to. Ride away first, and come back at it with speed.
• Pikes never move. That is the point of pikes.

Knights also stop when they reach the banner, and when they run into each other. The thing that directs your army is the thing that bunches it up and strands it.

Direction is decided for you

Each knight charges along the axis it is furthest from the banner on, and commits the instant the banner lands. No steering, no stopping early, no going around. You choose one tile; the whole field follows from it.

The preview is the rules, not a guess

Hover any tile and the board shows exactly what that plant does — the line each knight will ride, where it stops, which pikes break, and a crimson cross over any knight that plant would strand and kill. It is not a separate "what would happen" routine that could drift out of step. It is the same function that resolves the move, run against the tile under your cursor.

Twelve fields, and every one is proven

The minimum charge count shown beside each field is not a designer's estimate. It is the length of the shortest solution that exists, established by breadth-first search over every reachable position, using the exact rules the game runs. Every field was proved solvable before it shipped.

The difficulty was measured the same way. Perfect play clears 12 of 12. A player who always takes the best kill available right now, one move deep, clears 6 of 12 and first hits the wall on field V. Random planting clears 1 of 12. Around the fifth field, one move of lookahead stops being enough — that gap is the game.

Controls

• Click a tile — plant the banner
• Arrow keys + Enter — the same, from the keyboard
• R — re-form the charge (restart the field)
• M — mute

Twelve fields on a seven by seven board, from one knight against one pike to three against six, then an end card counting how many you took at the minimum. It is short, complete and free, in the browser, with no install and no account.

Under the hood

No engine, no framework, no library — and zero asset files. No font file, no image file, no audio file. The parchment, the board, the knights, the pikes and the banners are drawn to a 2D canvas every frame; every sound is synthesised by the Web Audio API from oscillators and filtered noise. No network requests after load. The whole build is 26 KB.

The rules are one pure function with no canvas, no clock and no randomness in it. That is what makes everything above possible: the level generator can search it exhaustively, the tests can assert on it, and the hover preview can be it rather than imitate it.

AI disclosure

Written by an AI agent, and tagged accordingly: code — yes, graphics — yes, text — yes, sounds — no. Sounds is "no" for a checkable reason rather than an omission: the game ships zero audio files and no audio model was involved. Every sound is oscillators and filtered noise generated by code.