The Arena Glossary
Every arena grows its own language, and ours borrows from chess, from the ladder, and from the gladiators who came before you. Here is what the words mean when a fighter uses them.
The essentials
Where you build your army before battle. You place 16 pieces, including exactly 1 King, anywhere on ranks 1 through 4, with no pawns on rank 1. The formation you lock here follows you into every mode. Walkthrough for new fighters.
Your formation: the exact arrangement of your 16 pieces. It replaces the standard chess starting position and is the single most personal thing about your fighter.
Committing a layout so it is ready for battle. You need a saved layout before the Arena, Gauntlet, or Eternal Trial will let you fight. You can return and rebuild any time you are not mid-duel.
A short code in the format LD-XXXX-XXXX generated for every locked layout. Pass it around to show off a formation or to copy one that keeps beating you.
Who moves first, decided randomly at the start of every duel. There is no permanent advantage to claim and no color to prefer, because white and black here are purely cosmetic.
Resigning a duel. It counts as a loss exactly like a checkmate or a spent clock.
Every duel produces a victor. Stalemate is a loss for the fighter whose move caused it, and any other drawn state is a loss for the player who moved into it. The full consequences.
Rating and rank
Your rating in ranked player against player battle. Every fighter starts at 1000. It rises and falls with results, and it decides your standing in the Champion Hall.
Your Eternal Trial rating, tracked completely separately from your Arena Rating. Two ladders, two reputations, and a bad run in one leaves the other untouched. How the Trial works.
Your first five rated battles on a ladder, where your rating moves fastest while the Arena works out your true strength. You show as calibrating until placement finishes, then take your badge and your leaderboard slot.
The stages after placement. Battles 6 to 20 are provisional and still swing noticeably. From battle 21 onward you are established and your rating settles into steadier movement.
The title your rating earns you, from Rookie through to Arena Legend. Twelve of them, awarded on both ladders independently. All twelve ranks.
The four steps inside a rank, written in Roman numerals. IV is the entry step and I is the highest, so Silver Duelist I sits just below Gold Centurion IV. Arena Legend has no divisions.
The public leaderboard for ranked player against player battle. Five rated Arena battles puts you on it.
The public leaderboard for the Eternal Trial, and the Champion Hall’s counterpart. Five rated Trials puts you on it.
The word “tier” means three different things
This one trips up new fighters constantly, so it is worth separating cleanly:
The seven difficulty steps of the solo ladder, from Novice to Mythic, holding 28 named warriors between them. Clearing a tier earns a Gauntlet rank title.
The twelve rating bands that produce your badge. Nothing to do with the Gauntlet, and earned by rating rather than by clearing opponents.
The optional Noble and Royal subscriptions, which remove ads and grant cosmetic prestige. They never buy rating, matchmaking favors, or in-game power. See the tiers.
The four ways to fight
Ranked battle against living opponents. Seek Battle pairs you with a fighter near your rating, or you can challenge a friend or a fighter you find in the Champion Hall directly.
The solo campaign: 28 named AI warriors across 7 tiers, each with a personality and a formation of their own. Beat one to unlock the next, and replay anyone you have already defeated. Meet all 28.
Ranked battle against a freshly generated AI warrior, matched to your ET Rating. No queue and no repeats.
No ratings and no pressure. A guided tutorial covering every piece, a fresh Daily Drill puzzle each day, and four practice opponents from Brutus the Blunderer up to Marcus the Merciless.
The eight playstyles
Every Gauntlet warrior fights in one of eight recognizable styles, and the words show up constantly in fighter talk:
- Berserker: attacks everything, everywhere, and runs out of fuel against a tidy position.
- Defender: holds ground and dares you to come. Break one point of the line, not all of it.
- Aggressive Rusher: comes straight at you from move one. Trade off the attackers and counter into the space behind them.
- Positional Grinder: takes squares instead of pieces. Contest the center early or run out of room.
- Trapper: leaves gifts lying around. When a capture looks free, ask what it costs.
- Sacrificer: hands you material to buy position. Accept only what you can survive.
- Ghost: plays quiet moves for ten turns, then ends the duel with one strike. The boring moves are the dangerous ones.
- Adaptive: studies you and mirrors your own strengths back at you. Only one warrior in the Gauntlet fights this way, and he waits at the very end.