Pallwall
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Pick an opponent, pick a board, start. The presets are the sane options; the custom numbers are where the interesting mistakes live.

My games Rules
Who are you playing?
How hard should the machine be?

Only used when you picked versus computer. Easy wanders and forgets to build; insane will fence you in and then apologise for it.

Board preset

A preset wins: pick one and the three numbers below are ignored entirely. Choose Custom to use them.

Custom rules

Anything the rules allow, you may build — including configurations that are, frankly, a bad idea. That is the point.

Cells per edge. Odd numbers from 5 to 25. This site allows up to 25. 5×5 is a knife fight in a phone booth — three moves and someone has won. Anything past 17×17 is a pilgrimage: pack lunch.

How many cells one wall piece spans. 2 is the classic fence post. At 4 every wall is a city block and a single mistake reroutes half the board. It must stay below the board size.

Wall pieces in each player's stock at the start. Set it to 0 and there are no walls at all: a pure footrace, decided by who moves first and who blinks. Set it to 40 and it stops being a duel and becomes a public works programme.

Which side do you take?

South starts at the bottom and runs for the top row. Pass-and-play always seats you south.

Up to 24 letters, numbers, spaces and . - _ ' — no symbols or emoji.

Read the rules first

Field guide to the dials

Board size
An odd number of cells per edge, 5 to 25. Bigger boards reward patience: there is more room to run around a wall, so fences have to be built in chains rather than dropped in front of a nose.
Wall length
How many cells one wall piece covers. Two is standard. Longer walls are blunter instruments — they cut the board in half in one move, and they run out of legal anchors near the edges, so the endgame gets strange.
Walls each
Your whole stock for the game. Zero walls turns Pallwall into a straight footrace, which is a genuinely different (and very fast) game. A large stock turns it into a construction contest that happens to have two pawns wandering through it.

Whatever you build, the engine still refuses any wall that would seal a player away from their goal row entirely — so no configuration can produce an unwinnable board.

What the presets play like

Board presets and their rules
Preset Board Wall Walls each Feels like
Blitz 5×5 2 4 5x5, four walls each. A complete game in a couple of minutes.
Duel 7×7 2 8 A tighter 7x7 duel. Fewer squares, so every wall bites harder.
Classic 9×9 2 10 The standard 9x9 board: ten two-cell walls each. Start here.
Skirmish 11×11 2 12 11x11 with twelve walls each — room to manoeuvre and to trap.
Labyrinth 13×13 3 16 13x13 with three-cell walls and sixteen of them. Build a maze.
Colossus 15×15 2 20 A 15x15 marathon with twenty walls apiece. Long games.
Long Wall 15×15 4 12 15x15 with four-cell walls: each placement seals a whole corridor.