Hidage

How a ride works, and the real rule underneath it

The Burghal Hidage is an early tenth-century English document. It lists Alfred’s fortified towns and the hides assigned to each, and it states the arithmetic plainly: four men are needed to defend every pole of wall — a pole being five and a half yards. That single line is the whole of this game.

Everything you enclose feeds you, at half a man an acre each harvest. Every pole of the border you just drew eats four men, every harvest, for ever. Men gained scale with area; men spent scale with perimeter. So a snaky sliver of a given size is underwater permanently while a round lobe of the same size eventually pays, and your skill shows up on the screen as a shape rather than as a score.

Where it turns a profit was measured, not decided

A disc of radius 21 nets −1.5 men a harvest. A disc of radius 22 nets +38.5. That is not a number anybody picked — it falls out of the two constants above, on the taxicab wall the code actually charges for, and a test re-derives it from the shipped values on every build. If either constant moves, the break-even moves with it and the test says so.

Which means the first ride is the real one. Doing nothing bleeds about seventy-eight men a harvest, and you start with enough for six. A clean opening lobe — out along the shore, round, and home — takes a little over four. The margin is thin on purpose: a start that forgave a timid circle would teach the opposite of everything above.

Not every pole costs the same

This is the strategy layer, and it is one number per edge. The sea is the wall — a coastal border costs nothing at all. A Roman road costs a quarter of the usual, because the agger and its ditch are already cut; Winchester and Eoferwic both did exactly this. Open heath costs the full four. So a good map read looks like a fat lobe with one suspiciously straight side, and your burh opens on the water because the water is free.

The best moment in it is a weld

Close a second lobe so that it touches the first, and their shared border stops being border at all. Acreage rises and upkeep falls, in the same instant. The game calls that out by name when it happens, because it is a thing you can plan and it is the only place in the arithmetic where the two numbers move in your favour together.

What ends a run

Two things, and neither of them is a dice roll. Ride into the water and the horse goes off the last of the land. Or let the wall outrun the fields, and at a harvest there are not enough men to hold what you have drawn — the garrison walks, and what walks does not come back. There is no combat in this game and nothing is hunting you; the only opponent is a shape you drew yourself.

It runs in your browser and stays there

No account, no sign-in, and the game itself makes no network call. Each day’s map is the same map for everybody, drawn from the date, and the link you share opens on the same ground with your acreage printed above it. There is no code here that could send anything anywhere: the tools in this corner are forbidden to make requests at all, and a test enforces that rather than anybody remembering. The one thing on this page that does talk to our server is the comment box at the foot, and only when you post in it.

The map is drawn flat and from directly above, which is a deliberate choice rather than a shortcut: the one judgement the game asks you to make is whether a lobe is round or ragged, and any camera with perspective in it foreshortens the far side of the thing you are trying to judge. The edges are blocky for the same reason — the wall is charged by the cell side, so a smoothed curve would be drawing something prettier than the price.

Argue about it in the forum

The board’s forum has a room for this. Post the day’s map and your acreage, and be told your second lobe should have welded.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan game inspired by The Last Kingdom — the television series and the novels of Bernard Cornwell it is based on — naming the work, its setting and its premise under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Carnival Film & Television, Netflix, or Bernard Cornwell and his publishers.

Nobody is named in it and nobody appears in it. The rider is a wedge on a map. The Burghal Hidage is a real historical document in the public domain and its arithmetic is a fact, not anybody’s invention; the heath, the coast and the Roman road are the ordinary furniture of ninth-century England. Every line of text here was written fresh for this page. No dialogue, novel text, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series or book is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Last Kingdom.

The rest of the corner

The Last Kingdom wing has Lord of Bebbanburg, Hold the Wall, Holmgang, The War for the Kingdoms, Saxon or Dane, Arseling to Ealdorman, The King’s Shadow, Storm the Coast, The Burh Holds, the trivia rounds and the character pages. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill and Fringe wings alongside it, and the free tools that are not about anybody’s fiction. If you would rather play something with a map in it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.