How Cave Smash works

How a fight works

A fight is one Smasher against one Smasher, each with an optional pet. Nobody presses anything during it. The game's server simulates the whole fight in one go, then your phone replays it as an animation that you can watch at normal speed, at double speed, or skip.

Fighters act in turns. Who acts next depends on speed, which comes from Agility compared with the opponent's Agility, and from the weapon in hand. On its turn a Smasher attacks; the defender can dodge, parry (a parried hit does a quarter of its damage) or take it. Hits can be critical, and a fast fighter can chain up to three attacks in one turn.

The fight ends when a Smasher reaches zero hit points. If nobody is down after 80 turns, the one with the larger share of health left wins.

• Everyone starts bare-handed. Each Smasher carries a bag of up to 6 weapons. At the start of a turn with an empty hand, there is a 60 % chance to pull one out. The favourite weapon is three times more likely to come out than each of the others.
• Weapons get lost. A weapon in hand can be thrown at the enemy (20 % of armed turns by default, more for weapons made to fly), tossed aside for the next one (10 %), or knocked away by a disarm. A lost weapon is gone for that fight only.
• No one-shots at low level. Below level 10 a Smasher cannot lose more than 35 % of its health in a single turn; below level 20, 60 %.
• Same input, same fight. The simulation is deterministic: the server stores a random seed with each fight, and the same seed with the same fighters always produces the same fight. Replays are kept for 3 days.

Smashers

A Smasher is one caveman. You choose its sex, one of five heads, its skin and hair colours and its name. It starts at level 1 with no weapon at all: fists, five points in each stat, and five more points to place where you like.

There is no level cap. Each level up to 50 gives 5 stat points, levels 51 to 100 give 3, and levels beyond 100 give 1. The slowdown is deliberate: a well-built Smasher can beat a higher-level one that was built carelessly.

The four stats

Strength

Damage with heavy weapons and fists. A stronger defender parries more often.

Agility

Damage with light and thrown weapons. Speed, dodging and chained attacks, measured against the opponent's Agility.

Intelligence

Damage with reach, flexible and blade weapons. Critical hits. Some skills need a minimum Intelligence to work.

Vitality

Hit points.

Chances such as dodge, parry and crit depend on your stat relative to the opponent's, not on its raw value. That keeps a level 5 fight and a level 50 fight feeling the same.

The level-up draft

Every level-up opens a draft of three cards. You keep one; the other two are gone. This is the only way to get a weapon, a piece of gear, a skill or a pet. Each card's type and rarity are rolled separately by the server, and the odds are shown inside the game.

Drawing a card your Smasher already owns upgrades it by one star, up to five. Each star adds 10 % to the item's numbers.

• Re-rolls. You can replace all three cards. The first five re-rolls of a draft cost pebbles, the soft currency earned by playing: 40, 100, 250, 600, then 1,500. One more re-roll per draft can be paid in amber (15). That is the hard limit for paid re-rolls on one draft.
• Bad-luck protection. If a Smasher goes 10 drafts in a row without being shown an Epic or Legendary card, its next draft is a Rare+ draft: only Rare (50 %), Epic (30 %) and Legendary (20 %) cards.
• Type and rarity are never re-rolled behind your back. The item is picked inside the type and rarity that were rolled, so the real odds are exactly the published odds.

Weapons and the six families

There are 27 weapons. Each belongs to a family, and a family is a way of fighting, not a power level.

Rarity tells you which era the object fell from: Common things are from the Stone Age, Rare ones from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Epic ones from modern times, Legendary ones from the future.

Browse all 27 weapons

Gear, skills and pets

Gear fills four slots: helmet, top, pants and boots. There are 24 pieces, six per slot. Gear gives armor and small stat bonuses, and it changes how your Smasher looks: compare the Sabertooth Skull with the Jet Boots.

Skills are passive. There are 15, a Smasher can own up to eight, and all owned skills are active at once. Examples: War Cry adds 40 % damage to the first attack of a fight, Pit Trap cancels the opponent's first attack, Rift Shield lets a Smasher survive one lethal blow with 1 hit point.

Pets fight beside their owner, one at a time. There are 10, with four behaviours: strikers attack the enemy Smasher, hunters go for the enemy pet first, guards take hits meant for their owner, and pests are weak but slow the enemy down. Pets have their own hit points and can be knocked out.

Trophies, arenas and seasons

Winning a fight gives trophies, losing takes some away. The amounts follow an Elo-style rule: beating a stronger opponent pays more. Your trophies decide your arena, and there are 8 of them, from Stone Cave to Renaissance Piazza. Higher arenas pay more pebbles per fight.

A season lasts 28 days. During a season you cannot fall out of an arena you have reached. At the end, trophies above 600 are halved and every account is paid a reward for the arena of its best Smasher.

Each Smasher has 3 fights a day. Opponents come from the same level bracket and from nearby trophies, and the game always offers three: one easier, one even, one harder.

See the eight arenas

Tribes

Your account is a tribe. You give it a name, an emblem and a banner, and you fill it with cavemen. A tribe starts with 3 places and can grow to 10. Every Smasher in it has its own level, build, equipment, pet, trophies and daily fights.

Leaderboards rank single Smashers and whole tribes, and show each season's standing. Chat and alliances between tribes are not in the launch version.

Tournaments

A tournament is played every two days at 18:00 UTC. Entering costs 150 pebbles per Smasher. Entrants are grouped by level and trophies into brackets of 8 or 16, single elimination, and every match is a normal fight that you can watch afterwards.

Tournaments do not touch trophies. Everybody gets pebbles and experience according to the rounds won. The finalist and the winner get a little amber, and the winner also gets two free re-roll tokens and the Champion title.

Battle pass

Each 28-day season has a pass of 40 tiers. Every fight gives 10 pass points and every win 5 more; a tier takes 75 points. A free player who uses all the daily fights of three Smashers finishes the pass in about 27 days.

The free track pays pebbles, a little amber, re-roll tokens and a few cosmetics. The premium track, planned at $4.99 per season, adds more of the same plus its own cosmetics, and raises the daily fights from 3 to 5 per Smasher. Neither track contains a weapon, a piece of gear, a skill or a pet.

Fair play: no pay-to-win

The rule we design around is short: money buys time, never a higher ceiling. Four concrete rules follow from it, and each one is enforced by an automated test that runs whenever the game changes.

1. Nothing with a stat is sold

   Every weapon, gear piece, skill and pet comes from level-up drafts. The shop sells caveman slots, pebbles, extra fights, an XP boost, a rename and looks. Looks never change a fight: the combat engine does not read them.

2. Everything that speeds you up is capped per day

   At most 2 extra fights per Smasher per day, one XP boost at a time, 3 amber-to-pebbles conversions per day, and one amber re-roll per draft. Rewarded ads are capped per day too.

3. Rarity is variety, not power

   No item is worth more than 15 % above a Common item of its kind. The targets are +5 % for Rare, +10 % for Epic and +15 % for Legendary. What a rarer item really brings is a different mix of side effects, such as accuracy, parry or combo chance, and a different look.

4. The spender is measured against the free player

   We simulate 60 days of a free player and of a player who buys everything allowed, every single day. The spender levels up faster: level 30 when the free player is level 16. But against a free player of the same level, the spender wins about half of the fights: between 49 % and 52 % in our recent runs. The test fails if that number goes above 58 %.

What money does buy: more fights and experience per day, more re-rolls to find the card that fits a build, more caveman slots, cosmetic looks, and 30 days without ads after any purchase.

Ads

Cave Smash has one kind of ad: a rewarded video that you start yourself. There are no banners, nothing pops up between screens, and nothing ever interrupts a fight.

• One extra fight a day, including a rematch right after a defeat. A rematch is a new fight; the defeat stays on the record.
• A bonus after a fight, up to 3 times a day: the win's pebbles again, or 15 pebbles after a defeat.
• One free re-roll in a draft per day.
• Two chests of 60 pebbles per day in the shop.
• The pebbles of the daily gift a second time, once a day.

Ads never give amber. After any real-money purchase, the same rewards can be claimed for 30 days without watching anything.