How to play

1 · The objective

The board is a square grid — nine cells on a side in the standard game. You start in the middle of your own back row; your opponent starts in the middle of theirs, facing you.

South starts on the bottom row and wins by reaching any cell of the top row. North starts on the top row and wins by reaching any cell of the bottom row. South moves first. The instant a pawn lands on its goal row the game is over — there is no reply move.

A player who resigns loses. Your goal row is drawn with a glowing edge in your own colour, so you can always see which way you are running.

2 · Your turn

On your turn you do exactly one of two things:

• Step your pawn one cell, as described below.
• Place one wall, if you still have walls left.

You may not do both, and you may not pass. Walls are a finite resource: once your stock is spent, every remaining turn is a pawn move. The pip row beside each player's name shows how many walls they still hold.

3 · Moving your pawn

A pawn steps one cell up, down, left or right — never diagonally, except in the one special case described in the next section. A step is illegal if it would leave the board, or if a wall lies on the line between the two cells.

4 · Jumps and diagonals

Two pawns never share a cell. When your opponent is standing on the cell you want to step onto, you jump instead — and the shape of the jump depends on what is behind them.

The straight jump

If the cell directly beyond your opponent is on the board, empty, and not cut off from them by a wall, you leap straight over into it. That is the only option in that direction: no diagonals are offered when the straight jump is available.

The diagonal fallback

If the straight jump is impossible — the cell behind your opponent is off the board, or a wall separates them from it — you may instead step diagonally, to either cell beside your opponent. Each of those steps is only legal if that cell is on the board, empty, and not walled off from your opponent's cell. A wall can therefore rule out one diagonal and leave the other open.

5 · Placing a wall

A wall is laid along the lines between cells, never on top of them. A standard wall is two cells long, so it seals two adjacent cell boundaries at once and pivots around the single interior post in its middle. Walls are horizontal or vertical, and they block both players equally.

A placement is legal when all of the following hold:

1. You still have at least one wall in stock.
2. The whole piece fits on the board.
3. It does not overlap any wall already on the board, and it does not cross one — two walls may never run through the same interior post. Two walls laid end to end in a straight line share neither a boundary nor a post, so that is always allowed.
4. After it is placed, both players still have at least one route to their goal row.

6 · Nobody can be sealed in

That last condition is the rule the whole game rests on. You may make a journey enormously long, you may funnel your opponent into a single corridor — but you may never place the wall that leaves them with no route at all. The same test applies to your own pawn: you cannot wall yourself in either.

Pallwall checks this for you before you can commit. A wall that would seal someone off is drawn in red and simply refuses to be confirmed, so you can never lose a game to a rule you did not know about.

7 · What Pallwall adds

The rules above are the classic game. Every match in Pallwall is built from three numbers, which you choose on the new game screen. They are frozen when the game is created and never change mid-match.

Board size

Any odd number of cells from 5 to 25 a side. Odd, so both pawns get a true middle cell to start from. Small boards are sharp and tactical — a 5×5 game is over in a couple of minutes. Large boards turn the race into a long campaign where wall economy decides everything.

Wall length

A wall piece can span anything from 2 cells up to one less than the board's edge. Longer walls are dramatically more powerful: a single 4-cell piece seals four boundaries in one turn, so games with long walls are usually played with fewer of them.

Length changes what "crossing" means. A piece of length L runs through L − 1 interior posts, not just one — so a long wall claims a whole line of posts, and no other wall may pass through any of them. The single rule is unchanged:

Two walls conflict if they share any cell boundary, or if they share any interior post.

At the standard length of two this is exactly the familiar no-overlap-and-no-crossing rule. At greater lengths it generalises without any special cases: long walls block more, and they also fence off far more of the board against future walls. Laying them end to end in a line is still legal.

Walls per player

How many pieces each player starts with — anywhere from 0 to 99. Set it to zero for a pure footrace with no walls at all. The count is per player, and both sides always get the same allowance, so neither side can be out-resourced.

8 · Confirm before you commit

Nothing you touch on the board is sent anywhere on its own. Every action is a two-step: you first make a preview, which is drawn as a ghost on the board, and then the action bar at the bottom of the screen offers Confirm and Cancel. Only Confirm plays the move. For a pawn move there is a shortcut: tap the highlighted destination a second time and it plays - the second tap is the confirmation.

• Tap a highlighted cell to preview a step. Tap your own pawn to switch the legal-destination highlights on and off.
• Drag out from an interior post to preview a wall — the direction you drag picks the orientation. Tap a post instead of dragging to preview a wall in the last orientation you used, and tap the same post again to rotate it.
• A valid wall preview glows violet; an illegal one turns red and shakes. Confirm stays disabled until the preview is legal.
• Press and hold anywhere on the board to show each player's shortest remaining route as a dotted trace. A two-finger tap — or a right-click — cancels whatever you were previewing.

9 · Controls and shortcuts

The board is fully playable from the keyboard. Focus the board first, then:

Esc, P and ? work even when it is not your turn. The rest wait for you.

10 · Reading the move log

Moves are written the way chess players write squares: a column letter from the left, then a row number counted up from the bottom. On a 9×9 board e1 is the bottom-middle cell and e9 the top-middle one.

• e7 — a pawn moved to that cell.
• e6h — a wall was anchored at that cell, laid horizontally. A v suffix means vertical. The anchor is the piece's first cell, running rightwards for a horizontal wall and downwards for a vertical one.
• resign — that player resigned.
• On boards wider than 26 cells the letters run out, so cells are written as r3c11 instead.

Every finished game keeps its full move list, and you can scrub back through it from the game's history page.