Blocade - Race to the far side. Wall in your rival. 2-minute duels.

Hi PH 👋 I'm Francis, solo dev on Blocade. I got obsessed with this genre — the race-and-wall duel where you sprint your pawn to the opposite side and drop walls to send your opponent the long way round. Two rules, learn it in a minute. But every version I tried was either a clunky port or wanted an account before it'd let me play a single game. The part that surprised me was the data. Once ranked play was running I had 33,165 human games and 3.4M moves, and I couldn't find another published dataset this size for the genre. Some of it contradicted what I assumed: the first player wins 49.8%, so going first is a coin flip. 97.3% of games open with a pawn move rather than a wall. And win rate rises the later you place your first wall — the instinct to wall early is just wrong. That changed how I built the bots. They were tuned to play "correctly" and it made them feel robotic, so I rebuilt difficulty around when they commit walls instead of how deep they search. Free in the browser, no signup: playblocade.com Feedback I'd most like: does the bot ladder ramp too fast? It's the hardest thing I've had to tune.