Territory game for iPhone & iPad

Borderline

A kingdom on a grid of squares, and five rivals who want it. Build up people in your capital, spend them to claim land, and take a rival's capital to take the realm. Quick rounds in minutes, or one huge world that keeps running for days. No account, no ads, nothing phoning home.

Coming to the App Store iOS 17+ iPhone & iPad Works offline
Borderline app icon — a five-by-five grid of rounded squares in blue, green, red and purple, with a ringed capital and a gold coin on a cream field

Borderline · v1.0

One

How it plays

Wait, then spend

Population builds in your capital. Tap a square next to your land and it is spent. Waiting longer claims more squares per tap, so the game is mostly about when to move. Coins burst into four, eight or twelve free squares, and can chain.

classic · garrison

Take the realm

Tap a rival's square to take it; the more of your land touches it, the cheaper it is. Capitals are expensive, but capture one and you take the whole realm. Land cut off from your capital withers within seconds, so a long thin line is a weakness.

five rivals · three difficulties

Long: a world on the clock

A foggy 256 by 256 world with 12 to 40 rivals that runs on real time, not on the open app. Look in a few times a day; when you come back, the time you were away is replayed and you get a one-line note on what happened. Three world slots, a fresh random seed for each.

runs for days · three slots

Eight experiments, and a Daily

Sudden death, Crown, Tide, Uprising, Fog, Gold rush, Two up on one screen, and a Daily: one seed per date, the same for everyone, and your first go is the one that counts. Share the result as a short line of text.

trial modes · daily seed
Two

Six themes

A theme restyles the whole game, not only the colours. Atlas has double rules and square corners, Blueprint is flat and drawn in monospace, Riso has hard offset shadows, and Night garden is dark glass. Each has its own capital medallion, coin shape and marks on open land.

Paper

Paper, dark

Atlas

Blueprint

Riso

Night garden

Three

The details

Boards

Square or hexagon, in every mode. A hexagon touches six neighbours, so the costs are softened to match.

Your kingdom

Pick a name, a colour and one of fourteen line emblems. Rivals get the rest, the same ones every time for a given seed.

Difficulty

Easy, Normal or Hard changes only the rivals: how often they act, how bold they are and how fast they grow. Your own growth never changes.

Growth

Grows with land lets a big realm snowball. Same for everyone grows every realm like a nine-square one, so size alone can't win it.

Sound & touch

Small synthesised cues, no audio files, and haptics for the moments that matter. Sound follows the silent switch.

Motion

Squares ripple out from where they change hands. Turn on Reduce Motion in iOS and the game stops moving.

Built with

A SwiftUI shell around the game, bundled in the app and served from it, so nothing is fetched.

Requires

iOS 17.0 or later, on iPhone and iPad.

What it doesn't do · online multiplayer · accounts · leaderboards · sync between devices · in-app purchases

Four

Nothing phones home

Borderline collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising, and no server for the app to talk to. It makes no network requests while you play.

Your settings, your Long worlds and your Daily result are kept on your device and go nowhere. Deleting the app deletes them. The whole thing is written down in plain English on the privacy page.

Read the policy