DHC Arena

Three of your Fighters against three of theirs, on one shared board.

DHC Arena is where the Fighters you assemble in DHC Fighters actually fight. You pick a Crew of three, pick a rival, and the two Crews trade turns on a single 7x7 board. Every gem you match belongs to somebody — match it and that Fighter acts.

Win and a wildcard trait drops into your collection, which is the loop: play the other games to earn traits, assemble Fighters out of them, send those Fighters into the Arena, and win more traits.

The art is Maxingo's, the same trait set the assembler draws from. The Fighters on the board are your saved assemblies, layer for layer.

You do not need an account to play it. Opened logged out, DHC Arena deals two random Crews and drops you straight into a practice battle — the real rules, the real engine, nothing simplified and nothing at stake. Signing in is what adds your own Fighters, a Crew you choose, rivals, traits and the ladder. The Practice section below has the detail.

Getting in

You need three Fighters standing to enter. A Fighter who has just fought is recovering for four hours whatever the result. One who was knocked out is resurrecting instead, and takes longer — from four extra hours if you only own three Fighters, up to twelve if you own plenty. A deep roster rests harder because it has somewhere else to turn; a player with exactly three is not locked out of the game for a day.

The Crew list can be sorted by Deadliest, Toughest or Hardest hitting and filtered by Fights like, and every card shows the health, power and fighting style the Arena will actually give that Fighter — so a Crew is chosen on what it can do rather than on what it cost. It pages once you have more than twelve Fighters, and picks survive both paging and filtering — the three you have chosen stay listed above the grid in formation order, and clicking one there drops it.

One battle at a time. You cannot start another while one is still going — walking away from a battle you were losing would otherwise skip recovery entirely, which is the only real cost in the game.

A battle waits for you, for as long as you like. There is no clock on it. Close the tab, come back next week, and the board is exactly as you left it: the same Crew, the same damage, the same position. Stalling gains you nothing, which is precisely why nothing needs to be taken away from you for doing it.

When you return, the Arena offers the choice: resume it and pick up where you stopped, or forfeit it and start fresh. Forfeiting is recorded as a defeat and every Fighter in that Crew is treated as having fallen, with the recovery that carries — giving up is not holding the line. Resuming costs you nothing at all.

Reading a Fighter before you field it

Every Fighter in the picker carries one word, and the number behind it is in the tooltip:

Surviving only tells you anything about a win. A Crew loses only when every Fighter has fallen, so there is no such thing as surviving a defeat. The question the label answers is whether a Fighter was still standing at the end of the battles you won — because one that falls on the way did not carry that win the way the other two did.

Read the position with the rate. A match of 3 reaches the FRONT rank, so the Fighter at the front is hit far more often than the one at the back. 60% at the front is a better Fighter than 60% at the back, and the tooltip says which seat it mostly stood in. Nothing is adjusted for you — the number is what happened.

Where to put them

All three of your Fighters attack equally often: the gem colours come up in equal measure, and a colour is a rank. Position decides how often you are hit, not how often you hit.

So the toughest Fighter belongs at the front, where a match of 3 lands and most of the damage goes. The deadliest belongs at the back — not because the back hits harder, it does not, but because only a match of 5 reaches it, so it survives longest and therefore attacks over more turns.

One exception: a Volley Fighter ignores reach entirely and hits everything wherever it stands, so the back is strictly its best seat.

And a fallen Fighter takes its colour with it. Matching a dead Fighter's gem does nothing at all, so losing one costs you a fifth of the board as well.

Your defence is your three strongest, arranged for you. Not your three rarest — rarity score is close to unrelated to how a Fighter actually performs, which is deliberate. The game fields the best three by the health and power the engine derives from their traits, puts the toughest at the front where every match of 3 lands, and the hardest hitter at the back where only a 5 reaches.

Only the attacker's Fighters need to recover. Your Crew defends around the clock whether you are logged in or not, and defending costs them nothing — a defender never chose to be there, so being popular must never be something you can be punished for.

The entrance

A battle opens in three beats: the arena and what it does to the fight, then the board falling in, then the two Crews walking on. The arena holds long enough to take the place in and read what it does to the fight; a tap moves it along if you would rather not wait, and plays the board and the Crews at full length rather than cutting to a finished board. Picking up a battle you left in progress goes straight to the board; that is not an entrance.

Practice

Practice pits two random Crews against each other with the real rules and nothing at stake — no allowance, no recovery, no traits, no ladder. Play as many as you like, whenever you like, including when you are out of battles for the day or waiting on Fighters to come back.

It is the same engine that decides a ranked battle, not a simplified version, so what you learn in practice is true of the real thing. When a practice battle ends you can go straight into another or leave, and leaving costs nothing because nothing was at stake.

Practice is also the whole game to anyone who is not signed in. A visitor arriving from a shared link lands in a battle rather than on a sign-in prompt: the page deals two Crews immediately, and the panels behind it explain how a battle works instead of showing a Crew picker there is nothing to put in. It touches no table, so there is nothing to store and no limit on how much of it anybody plays.

New battle deals two fresh Crews at any point, without finishing the one you are in. The Crews are dealt at random, so the first thing you often want is a different hand — a matchup you fancy, or a kit you have never seen — and it is also the quickest way to meet the weapons you do not own yet. The two Crews are drawn at random from the whole trait set, which also makes it the fastest way to see kits you do not own yet.

Live matches

Two people, both online, playing each other directly — no AI on either side. This is the first thing on Skulliance where the opponent is a person taking their turn while you watch, and it exists for one reason: somebody in Discord says "go on then" and you break away and settle it.

It is a sport and nothing else. No ladder points, no traits, no CARBON, no change to any Fighter's win/loss record, no recovery afterwards, and it does not spend a battle from your daily six. You cannot win anything and you cannot lose anything. What you get is the result, said out loud in Discord with both your names on it.

Because nothing is at stake, nothing is protected either: Fighters still recovering or resurrecting can play a live match. Being out of battles for the day does not stop you.

They are pickable in the ordinary Crew list — a Fighter that is resting is still dimmed, and still shows what it is waiting on, but you can select it. It is the Enter the Arena button that goes dark, telling you which of your Crew cannot take a ranked battle; Challenge live stays lit.

How it runs

Pick your Crew and a rival the same way you would for a ranked battle, then Challenge live instead of Enter the Arena.

The challenge is posted to the Arena channel and pings them, so it reaches somebody who is in Discord rather than sitting on the Arena page — which is the whole point, since that is where the "go on then" happened. It shows your back Fighter, named, with its health, power and fighting style: the back rank is the one only a match of 5 reaches, so it is what they will have the most trouble getting to, and they deserve to see what they are walking into. It also shows up on their own Arena page within a few seconds if they already have it open. They pick their own Crew of three, accept, and the board is dealt to both of you at once. The challenge stands for about ten minutes and either of you can call it off.

From there it is the ordinary game, turn about. You slide, they watch it happen, they slide back. Everything works the way it does anywhere else: reach, bombs, shield, charge, the arena's own effect.

There is a turn clock, and it is the only thing live adds to the rules. If somebody sits there too long the Arena plays that turn for them and the game moves on. That covers a dropped connection as well as a stall — nobody loses a match to their wifi, and with nothing at stake there was nothing to lose to it anyway. Leaving ends the match for both of you, with no forfeit and no record.

The winner is announced in the Arena channel, marked as a live match so it is never mistaken for a ladder result. Bragging rights are the whole prize, which is exactly why the announcement is the point rather than a footnote.

Whose move it is

When the defending Crew acts, the board says so. Their move is announced — THEIR MOVE across the board — the cell they are about to slide lights up, and everything holds still for a beat before it happens. An extra turn says whose as well: THEY GO AGAIN or YOU GO AGAIN, never just "again".

This is deliberately slower than it needs to be. Without it a defending move lands in the tail of your own cascade and reads as your board doing something inexplicable to you — several players took the Crew's reply for a glitch that was damaging them.

The board

There is a Guide button in the Arena itself, next to Leave. It shows the playing sections of this page over the board, so you never have to leave a match to look a rule up.

Five kinds of gem on a 7x7 board:

Both Crews share these five. The colour is the rank, not the person, so the same violet gem drives your back Fighter on your turn and theirs on theirs. Leave violet lying around and their back rank is the one who gets to use it.

A move is a slide, not a swap. Pick a gem and drag it any distance along its row or column; everything between shifts one step back toward where it came from. It is the same motion as Monstrocity and Skull Swap, so it should already be in your hands. A slide that makes no match is free — it reverts and costs you nothing.

Match size is reach

Their Crew stands in a line, and how far into it you can hit is decided by how big your match was:

Reach is a ceiling, not a requirement — you can always hit something shallower, and if nothing shallow enough is left standing the frontmost survivor takes it. This is what makes the formation a real decision: the order you pick your Crew sets front, mid and back, so the Fighter you least want reached goes last.

Cascades, chains and multi-matches

• A cascade — gems falling into a new match on their own — multiplies the damage of each further link.
• A multi-match is two or more matches from the one slide. Six gems across the matches pays +30% damage; nine or more pays +90%. Cascades are luck, but two matches from one slide is something you found, so only the slide itself is paid this way.
• A match of 5 or more gives you another turn.
• A cascade stops when a wave clears nothing. That happens only in one situation: every gem of the match is carrying a bomb that was armed this move, and an unarmed bomb's gem is protected from clearing so the bomb survives. The match still counts, it just cannot repeat. Those gems stay put, their bombs go live at the end of the move, and the next match on them sets them off.

Shield has a ceiling

A Fighter's shield cannot exceed half its own health. It is a share rather than a flat number, so a tough Fighter carries a bigger shield the same way it carries more armour, and a shield match that would push past the ceiling simply tops up to it.

Without that ceiling nothing ever took shield away except damage and a Break hit, so a Crew that kept matching blue banked it for the whole battle and eventually could not be killed. If you are facing a Crew that shields faster than you can cut through, Break (⛏️) strips shield equal to half its hit before any damage lands, and is the kit that exists for exactly this.

Bombs

• A match of 4 arms a grenade, which clears its whole row and column.
• A match of 5 or more arms a detonator, which clears everything — it wears a heavier white outline and pulses faster, so you can pick it out of a busy board at a glance.

A bomb sits on the board wearing a colour, and either side can set it off by matching that colour. It is not yours because you made it. Anything you arm goes live at the end of your move, never inside your own cascade — so a bomb is always a risk you are leaving on the table, not a free extra hit.

Bombs set off bombs. A blast that reaches another live bomb detonates it too, and that one reaches further still. The chain is what pays: two bombs hit about twice as hard as one, five hit about eleven times as hard, and three or more punch all the way to their back rank — which a single bomb can never do. You did not clear that board with one bomb; you cleared it with the bombs you had been sitting on.

When a battle is decided, every bomb still on the board goes off as a last hurrah. Nothing is resolved by it; it is the payoff for a board littered with bombs nobody dared spend.

Every piece does something

What a trait does comes from what it is, not from the slot it sits in. A blaster arm adds damage; a protector arm adds armour. Both are arms.

Your torso still sets base health and your weapon still sets base power and your fighting style. Everything else — head, headgear, arms, both effects slots and your companion — is read for what it is.

Tap any Fighter mid-battle to see exactly which of its pieces is doing what.

Fighters

Every Fighter's numbers come out of the traits you gave it, and a weapon decides how it fights:

Torso sets health, weapon sets power and style, headgear sets how often a hit lands big. Rarity helps but does not decide — the spread between two traits of the same tier is deliberately wider than the gap between the tiers themselves, so a well-matched common Crew genuinely beats a legendary one more often than not. A Crew of commons wins about seven battles in ten against a Crew of legendaries in simulation, and that is the intended answer: the Arena is about how you play, not what you were lucky enough to draw.

Charge builds one point for the whole Crew on every ⚡ match and erupts at 10, hitting everything on the other side at once. The meter sits beside your Crew's name, so you can always see how close it is.

The arena itself is the defender's front-rank background, and it does something — decided by what the background actually is:

Every background is a named place — Hellscape, Wormhole Passage, Thunderhead, Whiteout, The Xlon Complex — and where a background's own title already reads as somewhere you could stand, it keeps it. The rest are named from what they show, always keeping a word of the original so the piece is still recognisable. It is shown at the start of a battle and again under the board — hover or tap the arena's name there and it tells you what it is doing to the fight.

Three rivals the picker points out

Once you have fought someone three times or more, the Arena flags up to three of your opponents in the rival list, each with your record against them.

The list keeps its own order. A flagged rival stays on the card they were already on, so the picker still reads from rarest Crew down and you find people where you left them. The only one that moves is a rival the list did not have room for, and they slot in where their own Crew puts them.

Tormentor and Sitting duck need a one-sided record. Being 6-5 against somebody is neither; you have to actually be behind to have a tormentor and actually be ahead to have a sitting duck. So the same person can never wear both.

The nemesis often wears a second chip, because whoever you fight most is usually whoever you have the most record against. The card shows both, each keeping its own colour, and takes its border from the record one - that is the chip that should change what you do next.

Your arch nemesis

Once you have fought someone three times or more, the Arena works out who you are most locked with and marks them Arch nemesis in the rival list, with your record against them.

It is not whoever beats you most — that is a wall, not a rival. It is the opponent with the most battles and the least settled between you: ten fought at five apiece outranks ten you swept. The grudge is all-time and does not reset with the monthly season, because one that did would not be a grudge.

The card reads You won 21 · They won 11 · They started 63%.

That last figure is a share rather than a count, so you can see at a glance who comes after whom without adding the record up first — and it is the part worth knowing. Defending costs you nothing — a defender is played by the AI, is never benched, and never reaches the ladder — so until now there was no way to find out that somebody had been coming at your Crew while you were away.

Only ranked battles count. Practice is never recorded at all, and live matches never touch the ladder.

The trait drop

A win pays a wildcard — any trait in the game, not a fixed category. The Arena needs three assembled Fighters to enter, so it is never allowed to hold a piece a Fighter cannot be finished without. The same reasoning covers Realm Raids and Boss Battles; see DHC Fighters.

The roll is banded by how far up you punched — the gap between the rival Crew's best Fighter and your own, by rarity score:

So the hardest fight available is sixteen times the mythic chance of farming someone weaker, and six times the legendary chance.

The rival list shows this per opponent, once you have picked your Crew — the gap is measured against the Fighters you bring, not the ones you own, so it moves as you change your line-up. The best fight on the board is highlighted. Nothing stops you beating the weakest Crew every time; it is simply the worst-paid thing you can do.

It is the same principle as raid looting: the risk you took is what is being rewarded.

One rewarded battle per opponent per day. You can fight the same person again, and it still counts on the ladder — it simply will not pay a second trait. And the platform-wide cap of three traits a day applies here as everywhere else, so the Arena cannot be farmed past it.

A win only counts as your payout for that rival if a trait actually came out of it. A win blocked by the three-a-day cap leaves the rival unspent, so it can still pay you tomorrow — it used to consume the pairing anyway, which cost you the trait and the rematch both.

Both of those rules are now visible before and after the fight. A rival you have already taken a trait off today is marked Beaten today · no trait in the list — still pickable, because the rematch counts for the ladder — and a win that pays nothing says which of the two rules swallowed it rather than leaving you to guess. It used to say nothing at all when the daily cap was the reason, and blamed the cap when the real reason was the rematch.

The ladder

The monthly ladder is ranked on wins. Everyone has the same allowance of six battles a day, so with equal attempts ranking on wins is ranking on win rate, while still making an unspent battle a wasted one. Ties break on fewer losses, then on the longest cascade chain you managed.

250,000 CARBON is split down the ladder by rank at the end of each month, the same way every other monthly board pays — see Leaderboards.

There is an all-time board under the monthly one, same five columns. The monthly board is the live race and it resets; the all-time board is the record of everyone who has ever been good at this, and a new month cannot take it away. Only the monthly one pays.

Only attacking results count on the ladder. Your Crew defends whether you are there or not, and a board that paid for defensive results would pay for being popular.

Rivalries

The ladder says who is winning. Rivalries says who is fighting whom.

It has its own tab in the DHC strip, beside Fighters, Collection, Arena and Sandbox. Every player who has settled a battle in the window stands on a ring: their avatar, the Fighters they have been fielding drawn around them as portraits, and lines across the middle to everyone they have fought.

Nobody is boxed in. This is not a territory map like the realms: these are people and their crews, and what ties a Crew to its owner is standing next to them and sharing their colour.

Taking a picture of it

Under the map there are Download image and Copy image. Both make a PNG of the whole map at twice the size it is drawn on screen, so it stays sharp when somebody opens it, and neither needs a screenshot.

• Download image saves the file. On an iPhone it opens the usual share sheet instead, where Save Image puts it in your camera roll.
• Copy image puts it straight on your clipboard, ready to paste into Discord or a post. It is hidden in browsers that will not take an image on the clipboard, which today means Firefox.
• If a picture in the map could not be fetched, it is left out rather than drawn as a broken frame, and the button tells you how many were missed. | A red ring | Mostly attacking | | A teal ring | Mostly being attacked | | A slow pulse around an avatar | That is you |

The map moves the way the realms map does, and at the same rates: grudge lines breathe, your own avatar carries a slower, deeper pulse than anyone else's so you can find yourself, and a ring glows around anyone who leans hard one way. Hover a player and their lines stop idling and start marching in the direction the battles went.

Hover anyone to pick their rivalries out of the rest; everything else dims. Hover a Fighter for its battles, how they split between attacking and defending, the damage it has dealt and how often it has been knocked out.

Click a player for their panel: their record and win rate, the attack/defend split, every rival they have with the head-to-head and who started how many, who they fight most and who they are best and worst against, and their whole roster rather than the few the map has room to draw. Click a Fighter, there or on the map, and it opens the same panel the DHC Fighters Collection does, with its traits, its ranks and its proven record.

The window is 30 days by default, with 7 and 90 available on the page.

At most 12 Fighters are drawn per player, the ones fielded most, and the label says how many more there are. Somebody who has fielded twenty-five different Fighters in a month is telling you about their collection rather than about who they fight with.

Players get as much of the ring as they need, not an equal share. Someone with a deep Crew is given a wide wedge so their Fighters have room; players with nothing around them pack in close. Dividing the circle evenly meant one big Crew spilled sideways into its neighbour, which is worse than crowding because it leaves two players' Fighters interleaved.

Sizes go by area, not radius. A player with ten battles is not drawn ten times the size of one with a single battle, because that is not what the eye reads off a circle.

The window is 30 rolling days, not the season. The ladder resets on the 1st and this does not. On the 2nd the ladder is nearly empty while the feuds that were running yesterday are still on the map, which is the point: this answers who is active right now, and activity does not stop because the month did.

A red ring needs at least 3 battles and a 2-to-1 split before it appears. One attack is not a campaign.

Why some clusters have no Fighters

The avatars and the lines come from the battle record, which has been kept since the Arena opened. Which Fighters were in a Crew is newer: it has only been recorded since the participation ledger landed, the same ledger behind the proven ranks in DHC Fighters.

So a player can legitimately show a full battle history and no Fighters around them at all. Nothing is missing; those battles were fought before anyone was writing down who was in the Crew. The portraits fill in as new battles are fought, and the page says how many players are still waiting.

Why it looks like it does

Battles are announced in Discord when they finish, and the defender is tagged — an attack happens to a Crew whose owner did not choose the fight and was not watching it, so they are the one who needs telling. The announcement is illustrated with the fiercest Fighter of the winning Crew: the one that actually dealt the most damage, not the one with the best stat line.

A battle is never resolved in your browser: your move is sent as "slide this gem there", the server works out the whole exchange including the defending Crew's replies, and what comes back is the result plus a list of what happened for the page to animate. Nothing the browser says can change a number.

Every battle also keeps its seed and its move list, so any result can be replayed exactly — a disputed outcome is checkable and a bug is reproducible.