Penguin Gladiators

Three penguin gladiators. One arena. Three minutes.

Penguin Gladiators is a micro battler built on one idea: the enemies you kill do not stay dead. They rise on the far side of the wall, and everything your rival kills comes back at you.

ONE SHARED ARENA
You hold the bottom half, your rival holds the top, and endless enemy penguins march in through the portals — outlaws, renegade troopers, dark mages, rogue knights. There is no base to defend and nothing to rebuild. When your last penguin falls, your run is over.

EVERY KILL TRANSFERS
Destroy a wave enemy and it reappears on the far side as a shambling, green-eyed zombie of itself. Kill it here, it attacks your rival there. Zombies killed a second time are gone for good — and they eat any fish they walk over on the way in.

THEN THE WALL DROPS
At the three-minute buzzer the divider and its portals are removed and the whole arena becomes one battlefield. The two squads turn on each other, the boundary starts closing so nobody can stall it out, and the match is decided the only way it can be: last squad standing. No score comparison. No coin flip.

PENGUINS DO NOT WALK ON THEIR OWN
This is micro battling, not auto battling. A penguin with no order stands exactly where you left it and shoots whatever walks into range. Press on one, pull, and release: on open ground it is a move, on a hostile it is an attack, and from a healer onto an ally it is a heal. Where each penguin stands is the decision the whole game is built on — and every order costs attention the portals are also demanding.

FIFTEEN GLADIATORS, FOUR CLASSES
Take three of fifteen into the coliseum. Tanks have to be walked into contact to swing at all. Snipers out-range everything on the field and never need to move. Warriors close the gap, healers keep the line standing. Five factions — cowboys, wizards, knights, soldiers and heroes — and cards that hit harder on a penguin whose class or faction matches them.

CARDS OFF A SHARED QUEUE
Enemies drop penguin food as fish, and any penguin that walks over one picks it up. A full bar buys whatever card is at the head of a queue. Boons buff your own squad and each one moves a single attribute — strength, velocity, defense, health — so a card's job is legible before you spend on it. Assaults go the other way, at the rival's half: fireball and arrow rain fall as unaimed impact zones, so a clumped squad is punished and a spread one is not; deep freeze and slow pull the tempo out of their line; rust, plague and grave call work on what they have already killed.

Both sides draw from the same two queues and see the same top card, and buying it advances the queue for both of you — so taking a card you do not need is a legitimate way to make sure your rival never gets it.

LEVEL THE SQUAD BETWEEN RUNS
Every gladiator carries a level and four readable attributes, and the gold a finished match pays raises them. Squad power is the sum of what you have built, and it is the number you take into the next coliseum.

Round black-and-white bodies, oversized orange beaks, thick outlines, and a Roman coliseum to die in.

Every match is against the game's own commander AI, so there is no account to make and no online opponent to wait for. Press ENTER THE COLISEUM and the buzzer starts.