Blitz: a whole game in 15 minutes
A new mode with a finish line. 25 rounds of ordinary opolyx, then the richest player wins — about 15 minutes instead of half an hour.
In plain words
A game of opolyx runs about half an hour. That is the right length for an evening with friends and the wrong length for someone who has ten minutes and has never played before — and the numbers said so plainly: two out of three people who finished a game never started a second one, and most of them left by surrendering rather than by losing.
Blitz is the answer, and it is deliberately not a new set of rules. It is the same game with a finish line: after 25 rounds the game stops and whoever is worth the most — cash plus everything they own, at full value — wins.
Blitz is the first card in the mode picker when you create a room, it has its own filter in the lobby, and there is always a Blitz room open with bots in it, so you never have to wait for one. If you have never finished a game on your account, it is the mode already selected for you.
While you play, the round counter in the middle of the board shows the finish line instead of just a number: it reads "Round 7 of 25". When the last round ends, the result screen says the round limit was reached and names the player with the largest fortune.
For the technically curious
25 is not a round number somebody liked. The engine can play itself, so the cap was chosen by running it: 150 seeded games per player count, at two, four and six players, for every candidate cap.
| Round cap | Median rounds | Typical minutes | Ends on the cap | Leader at 70% still wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 21 | 12 | 100% | 57–84% |
| 25 ✓ | 26 | 15 | 99–100% | 66–81% |
| 30 | 31 | 18 | 98–100% | 60–81% |
| 500 | 55–111 | 31–63 | 0–19% | 0–13% |
25 is the knee of that curve. The cap fires essentially always, so the mode keeps its promise; most of the board still gets bought, which matters because three quarters of the players who quit their first game inside five minutes had never bought anything at all; almost nobody is knocked out, so almost everyone reaches the result screen and is placed rather than eliminated; and the player leading at seventy per cent distance still wins two thirds to four fifths of the time, which makes it a short game rather than a coin toss. Caps of 15 to 20 were measurably closer to a coin toss, and 40 saved almost nothing over Classic.
The mode itself is one changed setting. Its configuration differs from Classic in exactly two fields, and a test asserts that everything else is identical — so Blitz cannot quietly drift into being a different game:
// packages/game-engine/src/modes.ts — the whole mode, in one object
blitz: {
startingCash: 15_000, // same as Classic
unevenBuild: false, // same as Classic
turnSeconds: 60,
roundCap: BLITZ_ROUND_CAP, // 25 — the only rule that is new
taxStartRound: 100, // far past the cap: rents never soften
taxFullRound: 200,
speedDie: false, // no third die
speedDieFromRound: Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY,
},The ending itself is not new code. "Round limit reached, richest player wins" has been in the engine since the very first playable milestone, the result screen has had the sentence translated into ten languages for months, and neither had ever been seen: the caps were 500 for Classic and 300 for Speed, and the longest game ever played on opolyx was about 130 rounds. The 25 that Blitz uses is exported from the engine as a single constant, so the lobby card, the round counter on the board, the guide's comparison table and this page all print the same number.