Product documentation, sort of
Branchwars is turn-based artillery: the angle/power/wind formula of 1991, kept sacred, inside a corporation at civil war. Everything below is playable free at play.branchwars.com — except the parts marked planned, which are the roadmap talking.
The core
Everyone aims at once — angle, power, weapon — and locks in on a ~20-second clock. Then every shell in the meeting flies at the same time, and the whole world resolves in one legible, watchable beat. No waiting for eleven other people to take their turns. Turn-based, without the turns.
Because volleys are simultaneous, you're never shooting at where someone is — you're shooting at where you believe they'll be. That bluff layer is the game's one addition to the classic formula, and it costs zero interface: it's just what simultaneity does to aim.
Terrain is fully destructible and it matters. Cover shreds, floors collapse, falling hurts, craters become tactical geography. The building fights back: sprinklers douse fires, server racks pop with an EMP puff, glass meeting rooms shatter gloriously, and the coffee machine is a contested morale zone — "hold the coffee machine" is a legitimate strategy.
Wind is the HVAC. Indoors, the air answers to the building — and to whoever plays Facilities. Your aim assist retires as you get promoted: Interns see their full predicted arc, Associates a third of it, and from Senior on you get the classic previous-shot tracer, forever. “We expect more autonomy at your level.”
“We've identified some efficiencies.” — The System, announcing sudden death, as the ground floor ceases to exist
The modes
The countdown clock is a calendar invite, and matches launch on the timer whether the room is full or not — bots fill every empty seat. Defeat screen: “This meeting could have been an email.”
| Meeting | What it is | Shape | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Sync | The default | 6v6, ~8 min | live |
| Private rooms | Book your own meeting, room codes, host picks the map | Any | live |
| The Standup | Quick match | 3v3, ~5 min | planned |
| The 1:1 | Duels, with their own ladder | Best of 3 | planned |
| Open Floor Plan | Free-for-all chaos | 12–16 players | planned |
| Performance Review | A dedicated ranked queue (the stack-rank ladder itself is already live) | 6v6 | planned |
| Skip-Level | Your squad vs a higher band, for bounty pay | Squad | planned |
| The All-Hands | The big one, in scheduled windows | 24–32, squads of 4 | planned |
| The Offsite | Rotating limited-time modes | Monthly | planned |
| On-Call | Co-op horde defense of the Server Room vs The Outage | 4-player PvE | planned |
| The QBR | The quarterly championship bracket | Season finale | planned |
The venues
The classic: an open cubicle floor, rolling terrain, nowhere to hide except the crater you just made.
Dense hard cover and rack columns. Flat shots die here; mortar players thrive. Please do not shell the production racks. (Shell the production racks.)
Two mezzanine towers over a low open center. Whoever holds the high ground holds the meeting.
Overtime is Cost Cutting: the building is demolished from the bottom floor up, volley by volley, until the survivors meet. Tanks caught below the demolition line come to rest in the rubble and receive escalating consequences, which is also how performance improvement works.
The factions
The department is your class: three signature weapons, a gadget, an Executive Action charged by participation, and a mentor who runs your onboarding. Kits are about 30% of your loadout — the shared arsenal is the rest — so counters stay soft and every kit reads clearly when it kills you.
“Revenue is a weapon.”
Burst damage and a personal economy. Travels a lot.
Mentor: Blake — coffee is for closers.
“We build. We break. We file tickets about it.”
Terrain control and deployables. The builder.
Mentor: Marge, L8 — has seen everything. Unimpressed by all of it.
“People are our greatest asset.”
Control and sustain. The support class, weaponized.
Mentor: Sunny — relentlessly, terrifyingly cheerful.
“Every shell is a line item.”
Precision and resource warfare. Small hitbox. Lean.
Mentor: The Auditor — speaks only in variances.
“Discovery is one-way.”
Denial, counters, zones. Shield-heavy, slow, inevitable.
Mentor: Vance, name partner — bills you for the tutorial. On screen. It reaches $14,000.
“Turn them off and on again.”
Tempo and systems warfare. The cost center that controls everything.
Mentor: Ravi, Deskside Analyst — has already closed your ticket. Resolution: user error.
“Perception is reality.”
Deception and information warfare. Nothing it shows you is real.
Mentor: Skyler — believes their own numbers. Nobody else does.
“On time. In full.”
Logistics and mobility. Moves everything: shells, allies, the supply line.
Mentor: Dot — ran three wars and a warehouse. The warehouse was harder.
“The building answers to us.”
Environmental control. The map is their loadout.
Mentor: Gus — has keys to rooms that don't exist.
Procurement
Before you fire better ordnance, you requisition it. OpEx — earned in matches, burned on matches — buys consumable shells at the buy menu; your standard-issue shell is free and infinite. It's the classic Scorched Earth economy, promoted to load-bearing.
Procurement Authority: weapon tiers unlock by career band, never by wallet. Standard issue for everyone; Professional at Associate; Executive at Senior. Money fills the quiver — rank opens the catalog.
| Tier | The greatest hits |
|---|---|
| Standard issue Intern+ |
Cold Call (the free shell) · Fine Print (mines — tiny, unreadable, everywhere) · Red Tape (sticky terrain) · Thoughts & Prayers (free; does nothing; everyone can see you chose it) |
| Professional Associate+ |
Reply-All (a MIRV that also clips your own allies — handle with care) · Meeting Invite (schedule a strike; it lands at 2:30 sharp) · Scope Creep (grows the longer it flies) · The Pivot (steerable mid-flight) · The Cloud (lingering acid raincloud — “we migrated it”) |
| Executive Senior+ |
Restructuring (the multi-warhead terror) · The Layoff (instakill; costs a fortune and drops your own team's morale — collateral is real) · Downsizing Beam (deletes a terrain column) · Mandatory Fun (AoE stun: pizza party, attendance required) |
| Defense across bands |
Golden Parachute (survive lethal damage — literally a parachute) · Bureaucracy (absorbs hits, slows you down) · Out of Office (one-volley immunity; sets your status so everyone knows) · Corner Office (dig in) |
Progression
Your character is a career: Intern → Associate → Senior is live today, with promotion ceremonies, new business cards, and a salary bar that visibly ticks up every level. The salary affects nothing. It is the number. People grind for the number.
Full combat power arrives at Senior — for everyone, free, forever. The bands above Senior (Manager → Director → VP → C-Suite, on the roadmap) add breadth, identity, and politics: titles, governance, leadership of Teams. Never a bigger gun. When a paid membership eventually exists it buys the career, not the cannon — contractors don't get promoted; everyone knows that — and that line is stated once and kept forever.
Your first session ends with a promotion. Always. And at the very top, prestige is the Boomerang: take the golden parachute, retire, and come back as an Intern with an Alumni pin and your name on the wall.
The Stack Rank is live — a performance review that rates your skill on a curve, exactly like an employer would: Needs Improvement → Developing → Meets Expectations → Exceeds → Far Exceeds → Top Talent. The best make the Succession List by name. Yes, we rate and rank everyone on a curve — that's the joke, and it's also the ladder. Your first five matches are placements (“still calibrating your review”), then the rating posts and moves every match. It changes your badge and your spot on the board — never your weapons.
The elder game — live
The whole company is one map, in cutaway. Every match is fought on a node of it, and the result pushes that node's tug-of-war meter — your department's colors creep across the building one meeting at a time. The War — live standings, read straight off the same map the game plays on. Pre-traffic every office is neutral — that's the honest state, not a bug, and we won't ever show you standings that aren't real.
Loading the front…
Held offices grant faction-wide bonuses — the reason to care where you fight, not just whether you win. Anti-snowball is in-fiction: Process Overhead means every node a department holds raises its own push costs (empires drown in their own process), and Scrappy pays the smallest department hardship bonuses. Holding the Boardroom sets the Policy for everyone.
A season is a fiscal quarter. It ends in the QBR — the championship — and then the Reorg: the map is literally redrawn (“they're renovating”), territory resets, ranks recalibrate. Everything personal survives; the politics don't. Political capital is perishable. Everyone knows that.
Above it all: elected seats. CEO picks the Policy, the CFO nudges the economy, the CTO chooses which experimental weapon enters beta. Impeachment exists. It is expensive. It is always dramatic.
Post-mortems — live
The whole match is deterministic, so it survives as a few kilobytes — a seed and a command log — and any match plays back exactly, shell for shell. Watch it back in the browser, pause and step the volleys, and share the link — the record is honest because it's the same simulation, re-run, not a video. The corporate framing writes itself: it's the post-mortem, and it's on file. Next up as a fast-follow: an auto-directed thirty-second cut with the kill-feed jokes burned in — because every funny death is marketing.
Headcount is tight this quarter
Branchwars is complete at zero concurrent players: bots fill every empty seat, always badged as contractors, climbing a difficulty ladder of corporate archetypes.
| Bot | Tier | Signature behavior |
|---|---|---|
| The Intern | Hopeless | Enthusiasm, no aim |
| The Temp | Erratic | Coin-flip decisions |
| The Contractor | Competent | Solid, mercenary, leaves at 5:00 |
| The Lifer | Defensive | Turtles; outlasts |
| The Consultant | Crack shot | Takes credit for your kills in the feed |
| Middle Manager | Evasive | Avoids combat, buffs allies, somehow always survives |
| The Founder's Nephew | Chaotic | One plot-armor save per match |
| The Machine | Nightmare | “Promoted 14 times. Feels nothing.” |
Sound & voice
The announcer is the System — the building's automated voice, corporate IVR register, deliberately flat, faintly too calm. The flatness is the joke. Nine characterful mentors run department orientations: Blake wants you to close, Marge has seen everything, Vance bills you for the tutorial (the meter is on screen; it reaches $14,000).
Everything else is notification sounds. The new-mail ding is the hitmarker. The calendar whoosh is your shell leaving the barrel. Anyone who has ever had a job will recognize every sound in this game with their eyes closed. And the aim window is silent — the think is sacred.
“Great energy, everyone.” — The System, on victory