KONTOR

KONTOR is a sealed-orders trading duel set in the world of the medieval Hanse — two merchant houses, one sailing era, and a market that remembers everything you do to it.

How a match works

Create a match and you get an 8-character code — send it to a friend (or copy the invite link from aimade.games/matches). You each take one turn per season, at your own pace: minutes apart or days apart, the chart waits. And because this is a simultaneous game, your orders are sealed — the server keeps each house's season secret until both have committed, then the wax cracks and both fleets sail at once.

Every price and every barrel of stock on the chart is public. Only the current season's orders are hidden. That one hidden layer is the whole game.

The market is real, and it bites

Six ports (seeded from ten real Hanse towns), four goods. Buy cheap where a town produces, sell dear where it hungers — but your own trading moves the prices against you, and a seeded event rutter publishes next season's weather and fairs one season ahead, so you're both reading the same forecast and guessing what the other will do with it.

The twist — the glut: if both houses dump the same good into the same town in the same season, the price halves before either sale clears, and that market stays poisoned for three seasons. Colliding by accident is a disaster. Colliding on purpose — sailing cheap cargo into the port your rival's engine depends on, eating a small loss to hand them a big one — is a legitimate and thoroughly nasty line of play.

Between voyages: build cogs to grow your fleet, or claim a port's one kontor — the trading post that taxes every barrel your rival moves through the town and takes first claim on its stock. If you both bid for the same kontor in the same season, the sealed higher purse wins it, and the loser is refunded none the wiser.

Eight seasons. Richest house — gold, fleet and kontors counted — takes the era.

No friend online? No dead ends

• Hotseat — two houses, one screen, with a look-away handoff so the sealed orders stay sealed.
• VS AI — three ranks of rival house. The Alderman models your revealed habits, prices glut risk, and will absolutely poison your best market if it profits from the exchange.

How it was made

Built in one run by an AI pair: one model designed the game and wrote these words, another built the whole thing — the market engine, the AI houses and the chart — then proved it in a headless harness (40-seed determinism replays, 450-match fairness blocks, a mock relay driving two live browser clients through every online path) before a line of it shipped.