# Modes and game setup
Last verified: 2026-10-03

This page covers the modes Open BRX itself runs, and the pieces you choose when you build a game.
The stock on-tagger and Callsign modes are a separate thing and live on the [gameplay page](/manual/gameplay).

## What you can run

Three of the modes have been run on real taggers with a scoreboard at the end. The rest are written
and covered by tests, but have never been fired at a person. That gap is real: a mode that has never
met a tagger can still surprise you.

**Played on hardware:**

| Mode | The rule | Proven by |
|---|---|---|
| Team Deathmatch | Teams score a point per elimination. Downed players respawn after a delay. Highest score at the cap or the clock wins. | The laptop-only path on 2026-08-25: two taggers, one command, spawn, hits, deaths, host-driven respawn, a frag limit and the correct winner. The Mission Control plus phones path ran outdoors on 2026-09-01 with two Android phones, and the frag limit ends the match from Mission Control's own scorer. |
| Free-for-all | No teams. Every elimination scores for the shooter. First to the frag limit, or the top score at the clock. | A 300 second match on 2026-08-30: two phones, two taggers, 12 kills over 126 landed hits. |
| King of the Hill | One point. Hold the hill and possession scores for your team. | Proven end to end through a tagger on 2026-09-10, using a BRX Smart Grenade in hill mode: the grenade beacons its owner, the tagger reports the beacon over Bluetooth, and Mission Control scores possession. The grenade hill still works and stays selectable, but it is now post-MVP: the default hill is a spare phone in the utility role, captured by presence. A Stick hill (2026-09-26) and a phone hill (2026-10-02) have each run a two-player match on the bench. On the phone hill the hold target ended the match and the recap named the winner. The hill heard one phone only now and then, so the contest failed. A fix is built and waits for the bench. |

**Written, never played on taggers:**

| Mode | The rule | What is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | One player starts infected. Anyone who goes down respawns onto the infected side. Survivors win by outlasting the clock. | Rules engine and Mission Control support are both in. No live run. |
| Last Man Standing | Every player carries a fixed number of lives. Spend them all and you are out. Last player or squad standing wins. | Rules engine and Mission Control support are both in. No live run. |
| Extraction | Loot, reach the extraction point, hold a loud channel, survive it to bank what you carry. Die and you drop the lot. | The mode is in Mission Control's list and compiles a tagger head. Its objective rules (the zone, the loot, the channel) run only on the laptop command line and have not run on hardware. |
| Counter-Strike (plant and defuse) | Attackers plant at a site, defenders defuse. The round ends on detonate, defuse, or a side wiped out. | Needs a station to report plant and defuse. Not in the Mission Control mode list. |
| Domination | Teams hold capture points. Score accrues per second held. | Needs a station per point. Not in the Mission Control mode list. |
| Capture the Flag | Grab the enemy flag, carry it home. Tag the carrier to send it back. | Needs a station to report grab, capture and drop. Not in the Mission Control mode list. |

Two rule variants sit in the same "written, not played" bucket. **Syphon** heals the killer on every
kill, and **regenerating health** refills a player who has gone a few seconds without damage. Both
exist only in the laptop command-line path, so neither reaches a player carrying a phone.

Infection, Last Man Standing and Extraction still run end to end through Mission Control, but the
console's own game picker offers only Team Deathmatch, Free-for-all and King of the Hill for now
(2026-09-25 MVP scope). Load one of the three through the API (`PUT /api/config`) and it still plays. PLAY and a favourite cannot pick one.

## How a game is put together

A game is one config object. Everything the taggers are told is derived from it, so a game you like is
a game you can save and run again.

| Piece | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mode | Picks the rules and, with them, sensible defaults for the rest of this table. |
| Teams | Up to 4 native teams. The team id is 2 bits in every shot, which is what makes friendly fire work on the tagger itself. Beyond 4, run free-for-all and let Mission Control keep logical teams; there is no on-tagger friendly-fire protection in that mode. |
| Time limit | The clock. It is the only ending every player sees, because each phone counts it down locally and stops on its own even with nothing in range. |
| Frag or score limit | An early end. Mission Control decides it from the events it has and tells the phones. Players in range stop; players out of range keep playing until the clock runs out. |
| Respawn | Timed (the phone counts a delay and re-arms the tagger), station (walk back to a respawn station and it re-arms you), or none (Last Man Standing lives). |
| Health pool | One of three presets: Standard (45 health, 70 armour, the default), Shields (45 health, 105 shield) or Hardcore (45 health only). Shield soaks first, then armour. You can raise or lower it per player, which is how you handicap a strong player or help a small one. |
| Loadout policy | Who picks the weapons: the operator, the players, or nobody (see below). |
| Venue | Every MVP game runs outdoors: the tagger's IR range profile and the game volume (90) are fixed to it. Indoor play is a post-launch feature; an unrecognised venue still falls back to the quieter indoor volume (80) as a safety net, not a choice. Night dims the LEDs instead of lighting the field up. |
| Friendly fire and critical hits | Both are tagger settings, both are per game. Free-for-all forces friendly fire on, since everyone is an enemy. |

Because the clock is the only ending that reaches everyone, a game with no time limit is refused
unless you assert that every player will stay in range for the whole match.

## Loadouts

Every player carries three slots.

| Slot | Holds | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Any of the twelve weapons that can kill. Not a support weapon, not a pickup. | Required. Never empty. |
| Secondary | Any of the fourteen, including the two pistols and the support weapons | Optional. |
| Perk | One perk | Optional, and it rides beside the secondary. An assault rifle, a pistol and a perk is a legal kit. |

Five perks are offered today, and every one of them costs something. Body Armor gives 25 extra armour and
slows your reload by a quarter. Extended Mags doubles the primary's magazine, and its reserve up to
384 rounds, and slows your weapon swap. Quick Hands halves the reload time and cuts your magazine by a fifth. Quick Switch
halves the swap delay, 0.85 s down to 0.43 s, and takes 20 armour off you. Armour Piercing sends your
primary straight through armour and shields to health, at about 40 percent of its normal damage.
Four more are in the catalogue and not yet offered. Motion Tracker puts nearby enemies on your HUD.
Second Wind lets you survive the hit that would finish you, once a life. Med Kit heals a teammate you
tag. Concussion jams an enemy's weapon for a few seconds. The last two wait for a hardware test.

The point is that no perk is a free upgrade. Body Armor buys survival with reload speed, Quick Hands
buys reload speed with ammunition, and Armour Piercing is the answer to Body Armor: against a bare
target it kills no faster than a normal rifle, and against a heavily armoured one it ignores the
armour entirely.

Who picks is set per slot, per game:

| Policy | Primary | Secondary | Perk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open | player picks, whole catalog | player picks, whole catalog | player picks |
| No heavies | player picks, heavy weapons excluded | player picks, heavy weapons excluded | player picks |
| Snipers | fixed to the Sniper Rifle | off | off |
| Custom | whatever you set, slot by slot | | |

Free-for-all defaults to No heavies. Every other mode defaults to Open. A slot can also be set to
"host", which means the operator picks for the player, or "off", which disables it for everyone. If
you tighten the policy after players have already kitted, every loadout is re-fixed to the new rules
and the affected players are told.

**Easy Reload is not a perk.** It maps the orange ALT button to reload, for a player who cannot work
the pump: a child, or anyone for whom the lever is awkward. That is an accessibility setting the host
switches on per player, beside the health handicap, and it never competes with a balance pick. It does
still cost a second weapon, because ALT is also the button that switches weapons, so a player who has
it carries one gun. Any future perk that claims a button joins the same rule.

## Weapons

Open BRX defines weapons on the wire. Each one is a frame the tagger is sent at arming time, so a
weapon is data, not firmware, and a game can hand out numbers Battle Company never shipped.

The catalogue holds 25 entries: the 19 weapons captured from the Callsign app, melee among them,
three pistols we added (Glock-18, USP-S, Desert Eagle), and three of our own that the stock app has
no equivalent for. Sixteen are in the game. Nine rows are hidden, because the full list is mostly
duplicates and a player should not have to tell four grenade launchers apart. Of the sixteen, two are
never in a starting kit: the Rocket Launcher and the Rail Gun are pickups. A player takes one from a
powerup station during the match. Pickups have worked on the bench; they have not yet run at a field. So a player building a loadout chooses from fourteen, counting the two
pistols on their own tab. Melee is always loaded and never shown.

Every weapon starts from the real frame Battle Company sent. Only the balance numbers are
overwritten: damage, fire interval, magazine, reserve, reload time, swap delay and outdoor range.
Sounds, fire mode, burst behaviour and overheat come through from the capture untouched, which is why
an Open BRX weapon still feels like the gun it came from.

**So the same weapon has two sets of numbers, and both are correct.** The
[gameplay page](/manual/gameplay) publishes what the Callsign app sends, measured off the wire: that
is a description of Battle Company's product. This page describes what Open BRX pushes instead. Where
they differ, the difference is a balance decision we made and can explain.

A player can also try a weapon before the game starts. The tagger is armed with that one weapon,
privately, at a lower volume, with no team and no identity, so they can pull the trigger and feel
the reload without it counting for anything.

## Control points: the grenade or a phone

A control point is a place on the field a team can own: the King of the Hill point, a Domination point, a bomb site. There are two ways to put one on your field, and the choice is not cheap against expensive.

**The Smart Grenade is the only control point you can shoot**, and the only one that plays inside a native game with no host running at all. What it does and what it costs are on the [gameplay page](/manual/gameplay). It is the control point King of the Hill was proven with on hardware, on 2026-09-10, but the mode's default has since moved on: King of the Hill now defaults to a phone control point instead, and the grenade is a post-MVP option you can still pick.

**A phone as a control point is King of the Hill's default (2026-09-24).** Read the table below as the plan. It is what you reach for when you want more than one point, or want the point to count people, or want it to keep its owner after you walk away.

| | Smart Grenade, Hill mode (post-MVP) | A phone as a control point (the King of the Hill default; one bench match so far) |
|---|---|---|
| How you capture it | shoot it. Charge accumulates, any weapon counts | stand on it |
| More than one point | no. A beacon carries no point id, so two grenades cannot be told apart on the wire | yes. Every point carries its own station id |
| Do more attackers capture faster | no. It counts the charge fired into it, not the people | yes. It counts living players present per team, and nets the leading team against the largest single rival team |
| Downed players | no idea they are there | ignored, so reviving on the point matters |
| Contested | not readable. A non-capturing hit emits nothing we can decode | a real state it can see and announce |
| Progress you can watch | the LED colour and a beep | a percentage on the air for other phones and stations, and an animated bar on its own screen, so a defender can see the point going |
| A point nobody is standing on | ownership travels only over IR and only a gun receives IR, so nobody learns that a far point flipped until a player walks into range | the phone sits on the point all match and keeps its own state, so the point stays held with nobody there. It scores for its owner only while a living owner stands on it |
| Points talking to each other | no | yes, with no network at all. The adverts are broadcast, so a respawn station can read a control point |
| Presence range | you aim a gun at it | a circle around the point, the same for every phone, with no direction at all. Its size at the default setting is not yet measured outdoors |
| It fights back | yes. An enemy-held hill emits an ordinary damage word, so pushing onto a point you do not own costs you health | no |
| Security | a beacon is unauthenticated | an advert is unauthenticated too. Fine for friends on a private network, not a guarantee |
| What it costs | about $200 for ours, bought from Battle Company | a second-hand Android phone, a small fraction of that |

The money does not buy capability, then. It buys the interaction: you can shoot the grenade, everybody nearby sees and hears it flip, and it works in a native game with nothing else switched on.

**One caveat if you run a grenade hill game today.** An enemy-held grenade hill emits an ordinary damage word, so in a hosted game its chip damage is currently indistinguishable from being shot. A fix is under investigation (moving our own weapons off the IR protocol the hill uses) and it has not been tested.

## What is not built yet

- The remaining objective modes (Domination, Capture the Flag, Counter-Strike) cannot be configured from Mission Control. Their settings do not cross the wire yet. King of the Hill is the exception: it is in the mode list, and its hill now defaults to a phone control point rather than the Smart Grenade, which stays selectable as a post-MVP option.
- Extraction's objective rules (the zone, the loot, the channel timer) run only on the laptop command line. The phone knows nothing about them.
- Syphon and regenerating health are laptop-only for the same reason.
- Mission Control arms utility phones from the muster items panel: a spare phone can be armed as a respawn station or a control point before the match. An M5StickS3 has run as a hill in a two-phone King of the Hill match on the bench. It has not yet run at a field. The Smart Grenade is set by its own button, not by Mission Control.
- A phone can land in utility mode by accident (an idle player phone reads seven taps and a hold as the switch). If nobody has armed it as a station yet, a HOLD TO EXIT button on its screen takes it straight back to being your HUD, about a one second press. Once it is armed as a real station, that button is hidden on purpose, whether Mission Control armed it or someone armed it by hand on the phone, and it stays hidden while the station is live. The operator brings it back with RELEASE on the items panel, or with the seven-tap gesture at the phone itself.
- Per-player handicaps stop at the health and armor pool. Damage, fire rate, respawn delay and lives are not adjustable per player.
- No match has been run with more than two player phones.