What is WAGE?

WAGE — the Wide Area Game Engine — turns the real world into a game board. Pick a game, share a four-letter code, and a group of people with phones go play tag, capture the flag, or a pirate treasure raid across an actual park, campus, or neighborhood. Their GPS positions are the game.

The trick that makes WAGE different: every game is the same engine reading different data. Tag, Zombie, Capture the Flag, and a dozen others aren’t separate programs — they’re each a single data file (a ruleset) describing zones, rules, items, and bots. The engine doesn’t know what “tag” is; it just evaluates the ruleset you hand it. That’s why a new game is a file, not a release.

Three ways to use WAGE

Play

You have a phone and a join code. Walk, run, hide, and tag in the real world while the app tracks your position and tells you what to do.

Start playing →

Host

You’re the gamemaster (GM). You pick a game, place its zones on a real map, optionally add bots, and start the session players join.

Run a session →

Build

You want a game that doesn’t exist yet. WAGE games are hand-authored data files — no game-building UI required (yet). Learn the ruleset format and invent your own.

Build a game →

The mental model

WAGE is server-authoritative: one engine on a server holds the real game state and is the single source of truth. Phones are thin clients — they report where they are and what the player did, and they render whatever the server sends back.

  Players' phones                 The engine (server)
  ──────────────                  ───────────────────
  GPS position  ───────────────▶  Update world, detect zone
  "I tagged X"  ───────────────▶  entries & proximity, run the
                                  ruleset's rules every tick,
  map + objective ◀────────────   decide what's true, then
  "You're it!"    ◀────────────   broadcast the new world

Roughly once a second the engine ticks: it moves bots, processes pickups, evaluates the ruleset’s rules against the current positions and state, and broadcasts an updated snapshot of the world to every connected phone and to the GM’s console. Because the server decides everything, players can’t cheat by editing their app, and a dropped phone can reconnect and pick up exactly where the game is now.

What a game is made of

Every WAGE game is a ruleset — one YAML or JSON file — built from a small, shared vocabulary:

• Zones — regions of the map (a play area, a base, a hill), authored in meters and dropped onto the real world by the GM.
• Players & teams — each player carries arbitrary state (like it: true or score: 3) that rules read and change.
• Rules — when <condition> do <actions>. Conditions watch for zone entries, proximity, timers, and player-initiated interactions; actions change state, send messages, move items, or end the game.
• Items — things that exist in the world or in a player’s inventory (a flag, a treasure chest, a coin).
• Interactions — player-initiated, range-checked actions like a tag, a capture, or a pickup.
• Bots — engine-controlled players with simple behavior trees, so a game can be played with too few humans or against the machine.

If you only read one more page, read Core concepts.

New here? Pick a path

I just want to play Join a game in 60 seconds.

I'm hosting for a group Create a session and place the map.

I want to build a game Read a real game line by line.

Show me the games The eleven built-in games.