What is Walls.gg?
Walls.gg is a fast, original two-player abstract strategy game you play in your browser. The board is a clean nine-by-nine grid. You start in the middle of your home row. Your opponent starts in the middle of the opposite row. Your job is simple to describe and surprisingly deep in practice: be the first to step onto the other side of the board.
On each turn you do exactly one of two things. You either move your piece one square up, down, left or right, or you spend one of your ten walls. A wall is a short barrier you slide into the slot between two squares. It stays there for the rest of the game. Pawns cannot move through walls. Walls cannot overlap, and they can never seal a player in completely. Before any wall is placed, the game checks that both you and your opponent still have at least one path to your goal row using breadth-first search. If a placement would lock either player out, the move is illegal and you have to choose something else.
The core tension
Every turn is a trade. You can spend a turn moving forward, or you can spend a turn building. Walls slow your opponent down, but they do not move you. Movement is cheap and direct, but a single well-placed wall can cost your opponent two or three moves to walk around. Run out of walls too early and your opponent will out-build you in the endgame. Hoard them and you may never use them at all. Good Walls.gg players think one or two turns ahead and ask the same question every move: is my path shorter than theirs, and by how much?
Modes for every mood
Play vs Bot ships with three opponents. Easy plays mostly random legal moves and is a friendly first matchup. Normal walks toward the goal and occasionally places a wall when you pull ahead. Hard runs full path comparisons every turn and only spends walls when the trade is favourable. Local 2 Player is a quiet pass-and-play mode for two humans on one device — perfect on a phone, a laptop, or a tablet in front of a coffee. There is no login, no clock, and an undo button if either of you wants to take a move back.
Online Room creates a private match in seconds. Click a button, get a five-character room code, send it to a friend, and you are playing. The state syncs in real time over a live connection, so each move appears on the other person's screen instantly. If you lose your tab, you can reconnect with the same code and pick up where you left off. Quick Match drops you into the next public room in the queue, or opens one for you if you are first in line. Daily Puzzle serves the same starting position to every player in the world. Solve it in the fewest moves you can, then share your result.
A few quick rules to remember
- The board is nine by nine. You start with ten walls each.
- You can move up, down, left or right by one square per turn.
- Walls sit between squares and block pawns from crossing.
- Walls can be horizontal or vertical and may not overlap or cross another wall.
- You may not place a wall that would leave either player with no path to their goal.
- The first pawn to reach the opposite row wins, immediately, on the move it gets there.
Why we built Walls.gg
We wanted a small, honest game you can open in a browser tab, finish in three or four minutes, and immediately want to play again. No accounts to play casually. No ads inside the board. Mobile-first layout with big touch-friendly tiles, but it scales up to a full desktop window without losing detail. The whole project — the engine, the bot, the daily puzzles, the room code system, the leaderboard — is original work written for Walls.gg.
If this is your first time, head to How to Play for a tour of the rules, or jump straight into Play vs Bot and learn by doing. Returning players can warm up with the Daily Puzzle, then create an online room and share the code with a friend.