Why dWars

How we think about strategy

dWars started with a question we kept coming back to: why is there no great strategy game for people who actually want to get better at strategy?

That question led us somewhere unexpected. It led us back to chess.

The strategy genre forgot what it was supposed to be about.

StarCraft II has 4 million active players. The average player logs 400+ hours. Most of them will tell you they love strategy games.

What they're actually getting better at is clicking. APM, actions per minute, became the de facto measure of skill. Tournament players have 400 of them. That's genuinely impressive. But somewhere along the way the genre stopped being about strategy and became something else entirely.

Chess was never like that. Every move is a problem you have to solve. You're reading ahead, reading your opponent, deciding what to give up and when. The best players aren't faster. They just see things other people don't.

What would chess look like if the board was real.

Not in a gimmicky way. Just genuinely: take the positional thinking, the sacrifice, the anticipation, and put it on a real map. What does that game feel like?

That's what we're building. You command at scale. Formations, timing, pressure. The skill that matters is your read of the situation.

We're still figuring things out. The playtest is open because we want people who think seriously about this stuff in the room with us.

If that sounds like you, come play.