About

WikiBattle is a competitive multiplayer WikiRace game. Currently in Pre-Alpha.

How to Play 1 / 6

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Create or Join a Lobby

One player clicks Play from the home screen, enters their name, and clicks Create Lobby. A 4-letter room code appears. Share it with friends — they enter the code on the Play screen and click Join. Or use the 🔗 Link button to copy a direct URL.

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Set Up the Round

The host picks a Start article and a Target article. Type to search, or hit Random for a surprise. Set a game mode (Best of 3, Endless, Teams), an optional time limit, and whether Ctrl+F is allowed. When everyone's in the waiting room, click Start Game.

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Race!

Everyone starts on the same Wikipedia article at the same time. Your goal: reach the Target article as fast as possible by clicking only the blue links inside articles. No back button. No searching. Every click counts — think about where each link might lead before you click. First to the target wins the round.

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Power-ups & Coins

Win rounds fast to earn coins. Open the shop during a race to spend them on power-ups — sabotage your opponent with Fog, Shrink, Earthquake, Language Flip, and more. Protect yourself with Shield or Reverse. Between rounds, there's a draft pick where players choose power-ups to keep for free.

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Limbo — Between Rounds

After each round, a replay of the winner's path plays automatically. Then everyone lands in Limbo, the between-round screen showing scores and everyone's full path. Non-host players can suggest articles for the next round — same pair or a new one. The host reviews suggestions and starts the next round when ready.

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Win the Series

In Best of 3, the first player to win 2 rounds wins the match. In Endless, you keep playing until the group votes to stop — whoever has the most round wins takes it. In Teams, it's 2v2 — first team to 2 rounds wins. Use your coins and power-ups wisely across the whole series.

What is WikiBattle?

WikiBattle takes the classic Wikipedia game — navigating from one article to another using only internal links — and turns it into a real-time multiplayer competition. Race a friend, wreck them with power-ups, blow coins in the shop, and talk trash with emotes. It's a game about knowledge, lateral thinking, and chaos.

The best paths are rarely the most obvious ones. Getting from Rubber duck to Cold War in three clicks is satisfying in a way that's hard to describe.

Design

The game is designed around a single constraint: no searching, no back button. Every click is a commitment. That one rule turns a casual browsing habit into a tense, high-stakes decision. When your opponent can Scramble your links or flip your article to Russian mid-race, even a comfortable lead isn't safe.

Power-ups were designed to be annoying, not game-ending. The goal isn't to stop someone from playing — it's to slow them down, frustrate them, make them laugh, and give them a reason to hit back. Most power-ups have counters. The skill ceiling matters.

How it was built

WikiBattle is a solo project, built from scratch with an intentionally simple stack: a Node.js + Express + Socket.io server handles all real-time game state, and the client is plain HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript — no build step, no framework, no bundler. What you see is what runs.

Wikipedia articles are fetched live from the Wikipedia REST API at race time. Nothing is stored or cached server-side. Every article you navigate to is a fresh API call — the same content a Wikipedia reader would see.

Game state (lobbies, scores, live races) lives in-memory on the server. Stats and path history are written to a persistent disk on Render so they survive server restarts. The whole thing runs on a single $7/month server instance.

Status

WikiBattle is in Pre-Alpha. Core gameplay is complete: lobby system, multiplayer races, power-ups, coin shop, emotes, multiple game modes, stats, and path history. The major systems work. Right now the focus is on polish, stability, and testing with real players before a broader release.

If you're playing right now, you're one of the first people to touch it. Bugs will happen. Reports from the in-game 🐛 button are the most useful thing you can send.

What's next

Mobile layout — The game works on mobile but isn't designed for it yet. A proper responsive layout is coming.
Matchmaking — Public lobbies, random opponents, ranked play. Currently all games are private invite-only.
Leaderboards — Persistent player profiles, win rates, fastest times, signature paths.
Cosmetics — Player colors, badges, custom emotes. No pay-to-win, ever.
More modes — Ideas on the table include time attack, one-life elimination, and guided (hint) modes for newcomers.

Feedback & bugs

Use the 🐛 Found a bug! button inside the game. It sends a full session log automatically — the exact sequence of events leading up to the bug — which makes fixing things much faster. For anything else, reach out directly.

Legal

WikiBattle is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia in any way. "WikiBattle" is a working title.

All Wikipedia article content displayed in-game is fetched live and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). WikiBattle does not claim ownership of any Wikipedia content.

Wikipedia is a public encyclopedia and its articles may cover mature, graphic, or sensitive topics. WikiBattle does not filter or moderate article content. By playing, you acknowledge that you may encounter such material during navigation.

WikiBattle is currently in pre-alpha. It is provided as-is, with no guarantees of availability, stability, or data persistence. Game data, stats, and paths may be reset at any time during development.