How to Play

The entire world is divided into an invisible grid of hexagonal tiles, each roughly 174 metres across. Every tile can be owned by exactly one rider at a time.

Your tiles are shown in your chosen colour on the map. Zoom in to see individual tiles, zoom out to see the bigger territorial picture.

When you upload a ride, every GPS point along your route is snapped to the grid. Each tile your ride passes through becomes yours with 1 life.

Riding over a tile you already own adds a life to it (up to a maximum of 3), and resets its 30-day decay clock.

Every tile has between 1 and 3 lives. Lives represent how well-defended a tile is:

• 1 life ❤️ — freshly captured or under attack. One more enemy ride takes it.
• 2 lives ❤️❤️ — needs two enemy rides to fall.
• 3 lives ❤️❤️❤️ — fully fortified. Takes three coordinated attacks to capture.

Zoom in past level 12 on the map to see white inner rings inside fortified tiles — one ring for 2 lives, two rings for 3 lives. Hover a tile to see its current life count.

Riding over an unprotected tile owned by someone else chips one life from it. The tile stays with its current owner until all lives are gone — the rider who takes the final life claims it.

When an attack chips a tile down to 1 life, it triggers a 12-hour siege protection window for the defender, giving them a chance to ride back and repair before the tile can be taken.

Once the last life is removed, the tile transfers to the attacker with 1 life and a fresh 24-hour protection window.

Tiles enter a protection window in two situations:

• 24-hour capture protection — applied whenever a tile is freshly captured or changes ownership.
• 12-hour siege protection — applied automatically when an attacker chips a tile down to its last life, giving the defender time to respond.

Protected tiles have a dark border outline on the map. A 🔒 icon marks the centre of each protected cluster.

Tiles don't last forever. Any tile you own will expire 30 days after it was last captured. If you don't re-ride it before then, it disappears from the map and becomes claimable by anyone.

As a tile approaches expiry it fades visually — the more transparent a tile looks, the sooner it will vanish. On your own profile, the Tiles at Risk stat shows how many tiles are expiring within the next 7 days.

If your ride forms a closed loop — starting and finishing within roughly 200 metres of each other — all hexagonal tiles inside the loop boundary are automatically filled in and captured too.

This is one of the most powerful ways to claim large areas quickly. A circular or roughly circular route can capture hundreds of tiles in one go.

There are two ways to get your rides into Veloterra:

• Strava sync — connect your Strava account once and your rides are kept up to date automatically.
• GPX upload — export a GPX file from any device or app (Garmin, Wahoo, Komoot, Strava, etc.) and upload it manually via the Upload GPX button.

How Strava sync works

• First visit — you'll be asked whether to import your last 7 days of rides. This is a one-time prompt to get you started.
• Every visit after that — the map silently checks for new rides in the background. If more than 15 minutes have passed since the last sync, any rides from the past 7 days that haven't been imported yet are pulled in automatically. No action needed from you.

By default your profile and tiles are public — anyone can see your territory on the map.

Switch to a private profile in Settings and your tiles will only be visible to riders you approve (followers). Your tiles are still active in the game — they just won't appear on the map for others.

The leaderboard ranks riders by their current active tile count — expired or stolen tiles don't count. It updates whenever you open it.

Signed-in riders can switch between a Global ranking (all riders) and a Friends ranking (people you follow).