The Ballad of the Elements

Online duels are live

Duel a friend anywhere on earth with four letters.

A creature-taming game: third-person overworld, first-person duels. Catch elementals, raise them, shapeshift into five animal forms, and find out what the people who hired you actually do for a living.

Sign up for the beta How the duels work
Pyrelle, a phoenix whose wings are streaming fire, rising with wings spread against a smoke-blue sky.
Room code KVRA
66
elementals
12
elements
23
evolution lines
17
worlds

What it is

You are an apprentice druid

Not a chosen one. An apprentice, with a satchel and an alarming amount of enthusiasm, in a realm that is quietly being drained by people with job titles. The game is about extraction, and about being useful to it before you understand what you're being useful for.

You catch things, and they are people

66 elementals across 12 elements — a fox kindled from struck flint, a bat fond of long shadows, a tree-sloth so unhurried that birds nest in its moss. 23 of them evolve. Every one has an opinion.

Meet all 66 →

Duels are first-person

The overworld is third-person; the moment a duel starts you're behind your elemental's eyes, dodging in real time. Twelve elements, an asymmetric effectiveness table, and a spell in each of two slots.

Five forms, one locked world

Monkey, bird, bear, turtle, racoon. Each is taught by a master who will teach you — or fight you, depending on how you've been behaving — and each unlocks terrain the last one couldn't reach.

The 17 worlds and the form ladder →

The headline feature

Two phones, two countries, four letters.

Real-time player-versus-player across the internet. One of you picks Host and reads four letters down the phone. The other types them in. That is the entire setup.

  • No accounts, no sign-up, no email
  • No IP addresses shared between players, ever
  • Works on mobile data, not just wifi
  • Full team battles — swap elementals mid-duel
  • A friendly defeat is friendly: nothing is lost
Read the four steps

The form ladder

Every form is a key. The world was always this big; you just couldn't get there.

  1. 1Monkeythe climb
  2. 2Birdthe drop
  3. 3Bearthe door
  4. 4Turtlethe flood
  5. 5Racoonthe rest

Where it's up to

In development, and playable. Built in Godot 4.7 for Android and PC. The story is finished, the 17 worlds are in, and online duels shipped and work. There's no store page yet — the beta list is how you'll hear when there is one.

Sign up for the beta