– Squares claimed
– Players registered
– Season ends
What the game is

Players are on one of seven teams. The map is divided into squares roughly 300 meters across. You claim a square for your team by being in it and hearing the mesh from it. Teams take squares from each other. A season runs six months and the team holding the most squares at the end wins — but every calendar month inside it has its own winner and its own honors, so there is always something close to play for. See the results.

The seven teams
RED GREEN BLUE PURPLE YELLOW ORANGE PINK

Every player picks one of these seven colors, and every team competes for the same ground.

How scoring works

You claim a square by reaching the mesh from inside it. Each mesh node your ping reaches is worth a tenth of a point, up to one point per ping — and a ping that reaches nobody claims nothing, because being somewhere is not enough.

Squares change hands when a team matches or out-scores whoever is holding one, scores fade over time so held ground has to be revisited, and a square that just changed hands is protected for fifteen minutes.

The exact numbers, the cooldowns and every other mechanic are in the rules.

Net check-ins

There's a weekly net on Wednesday evenings, 17:00 to 23:59 Boise time. Checking in during that window earns your team 25 points, on top of any ground you hold — a check-in before 17:00 or after midnight doesn't count.

You can check in once per net. Posting five times doesn't earn five times — it earns once, same as everyone else.

Turn up week after week and each check-in is worth more, from 25 points up to 50 for a run of six nets or longer. Miss one and you start again — though a week where the net doesn't happen at all costs you nothing. The rules have the full table.

Points count toward your team's total alongside squares, so a night on the net is a real contribution whether or not you ever leave the house. Wardriving and checking in are two ways to play, not two kinds of player. People who take ground are Wardrivers and people who work the net are NetOps, but that's flavour, not a class you pick — do both and you'll show up on both leaderboards.

To be credited, your radio has to be registered to you. On Meshtastic that's your node ID. On MeshCore it's your contact ID, which MeshMapper binds for you automatically if you wardrive, or you can pick your node from the list when you join.

Places worth going

Summits, parks and landmarks are real destinations, not squares picked at random — summits from Summits On The Air, parks from Parks On The Air, landmarks from OpenStreetMap. Reach one with a scoring ping and it earns your team Explorer points on top of the square itself.

What a place is worth depends on how far it made you go, not what kind of place it is. Somewhere inside a town's own limits is worth a nickel whether it's a park or a landmark — step outside and it's worth more. A summit is scored on its elevation instead, wherever it stands, because the climb to the top doesn't change depending on where a town line was drawn around its base.

There's a weekly cap per person, so a town's worth of easy visits can't out-earn one real trip. Landmarks and small parks also rotate week to week, so what's worth chasing near you can change — summits and the bigger parks are always live. The rules have the full point table and how the rotation works.

Points go to your own Explorer Score as well as your team's total, the same shape check-in points already have — and each month hands out three honors for whoever visits the most: Tourist for landmarks, Park Hopper for parks, Peak Tagger for summits.

Every month has a winner

A six-month season is a long time to wait to find out how you did, so each calendar month closes with its own result. A month is judged on that month alone — ground held and points earned between its own dates — not on the season standings, so falling behind early never puts the next month out of reach.

Alongside the team standings, each month hands out honors — for taking the most ground off other teams, winning the most back, touring the most landmarks, hopping the most parks, tagging the most peaks, and claiming the most ground out past the towns. Every one of them is defined in the rules.

The two protocols
MeshCore Live

Playable anywhere MeshMapper works. Your position comes from the MeshMapper wardriving app, which forwards a copy of your wardrive to MeshWars.

Meshtastic Live — in one community so far

The same seven-team, registered-player, grid-square game as MeshCore, but painting depends on FreqMapper's coverage, which is rolling out community by community. Register your node ID on the join page to play; squares are then claimed wherever your node's broadcast position falls inside FreqMapper's current coverage. See the Links below for exactly where that is right now.

How to join

Registration and MeshMapper setup happen on the join page. Join MeshWars to get started.

Where it's played

MeshWars is currently scoped for the western US and Texas. If you'd like to join the fun or need help, please reach out to malice in the Intermountain Mesh Discord.

The outline is the live play area, read from the server — pings outside it are not scored. Open the board.

Links

This is the current list of where MeshWars is actually playable. The docs, rules and join pages describe how coverage works without naming a community directly, and point back here for what's live right now — so this list, not those pages, is the one to check for the current answer. The rest are the open source projects MeshWars is built with.

MeshWars reads two specific communities, not the mesh at large. The Meshtastic board is built entirely from the FREQ51 Intermountain Mesh meshview instance — your position and your net check-in both come from there, so a node heard only by gateways feeding some other instance will not score. On MeshCore, the squares you claim travel to us from MeshMapper wherever you are, but the weekly net is read from the #weekly-net channel on Mountain West Mesh, so a check-in posted anywhere else earns nothing. This is a limit of what MeshWars can currently see, not a judgement about which mesh is worth playing on. Widening it to other communities is under active consideration — if you run a mesh and want your people in the game, get in touch.

MeshWars has a read API if you want to build a mesh bot, a Discord bot or a dashboard on this data. Keys are free, just ask. API documentation.