Hotar

Hotar is a trivia and territory game played on the map of Romania. Every side raises a citadel, gets the counties around it and then attacks its neighbours, one question at a time. In a duel the faster right answer wins, and on a number question the closest guess does. Reach another player's citadel and you can lay siege to it, breaking it shield by shield.

It is free to play at hotar.tasta.space, in Romanian and English, and the language you pick sets the questions too. Practice against bots needs no account and works offline: the game installs as an app on a phone and plays with no connection at all. Online, matchmaking seats you with other players and fills any free seats with bots at the table's level.

Four ways to play

• Classic: 4 players on the 41 counties, about 14 minutes
• Quick: 3 players on 15 regions, about 6 minutes
• Mayhem: 12 players and everyone attacks at once, about 6 minutes
• Battle royale: 12 players while a storm closes in on the map until one survivor is left, about 7 minutes

Features

• More than 23,000 questions in each language, in categories players vote on before an online match
• Picture questions: flags, emoji puzzles, and real or made-up Romanian village names
• Streamer mode for Twitch: the streamer plays against their chat, chat answers by typing in the Twitch chat, and viewers take a seat at the streamer's table with a four character code
• Twitch sign-in, levels and XP
• A shop of banners, frames, titles, emblems and stickers, paid with coins earned by winning or bought, plus a VIP subscription
• An original folk sound set made in code: cimbalom, nai, bucium and wooden spoons, all tuned to D

How it's built

Hotar is a TypeScript monorepo. The game engine is pure TypeScript, ported from a PHP engine and proven against 300 recorded matches replayed event for event. The web client is built with Vite, with GSAP for the motion and a service worker that keeps the game playable offline. Every online match runs on the server: a Fastify app that talks to the players over WebSockets, with MySQL for storage, Twitch OpenID Connect for sign-in and Tebex for payments, all self-hosted on the tasta.space server.