Every Ludopoly game room operates on a perpetual two-phase cycle. The first phase is devoted to movement: players select destination countries, generate their travel proofs on the client side, and submit those proofs to the blockchain. The second phase pauses all movement and opens the floor to strategic card play, in-game communication, and alliance negotiation. This rhythm gives the game a natural cadence — bursts of navigational decision-making followed by periods of reflection and tactical preparation.

Movement in Ludopoly is not instantaneous. The time required to travel between two countries scales logarithmically with the distance involved, a design choice that makes short tactical repositioning feel nimble while ensuring that cross-continental leaps carry meaningful strategic cost. A player moving a short distance within a region spends only a few seconds of phase time, whereas a player attempting a journey to the far side of the world must commit nearly an entire movement phase to that single action.

This logarithmic curve serves a competitive balance purpose. It prevents any player from teleporting freely around the globe during a single phase, which would make positional deduction trivial. At the same time, it does not punish distant moves so severely that players become geographically locked.

The central information mechanic of Ludopoly is the fog of war. All player positions are stored on-chain as Poseidon hashes — cryptographic fingerprints that reveal nothing about the underlying country. Another player observing the blockchain sees only an opaque commitment. To identify where an opponent stands, a player would need both the opponent's private secret and access to the full country list, making passive observation useless.

The treasure's location is computed off-chain by the Treasure Oracle using a combination of a server-held secret and a verifiable random seed generated by Chainlink. This computation is deterministic and tamper-resistant. When you believe you have found the treasure's country, the oracle verifies your claim against the hidden location and, if correct, signs a proof that your smart contract submission will accept.