World Conquest: the classic game of world domination, one against five

Forty-two territories grouped from Natural Earth's public-domain outlines,
the classic eighty-three links, exact dice odds, escalating card sets, and
five bots that play every seeded game through to a winner.

NOTICE.md

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+# Notice, credits and provenance
+
+## What this is
+
+An independent reimplementation of the classic game of world domination,
+written from scratch in TypeScript in 2026: one human against five computer
+players, in one sitting.
+
+## The name
+
+It isn't called what you'd expect, and that's deliberate. The rules of a game
+are ideas rather than expression, and nobody gets to fence them off, so they're
+rebuilt here freely. The **name** is a live trademark belonging to a company
+that enforces it, and this ships on a public site with somebody's name in the
+footer. So the mechanics are exact and the vocabulary is ours. *World
+Conquest* is what the game was called when it was first published, in French,
+as *La Conquête du Monde*.
+
+None of that is a copyright question. Game mechanics are ideas. Names are a
+trademark question, which is about whether a reader would think this came from
+the trademark holder. Calling it *World Conquest* answers that, and costs the
+game nothing.
+
+The same goes for the cards. The published game draws a soldier, a horseman and
+a cannon. The rules only need three kinds, fourteen of each, so here they're
+named for what they are and drawn as plain shapes.
+
+## The map
+
+**The outlines are from Natural Earth**, 1:50m cultural vectors, admin-0
+countries and admin-1 states and provinces:
+
+- <https://www.naturalearthdata.com/>, public domain
+
+Being public domain, they carry no license terms of their own. They're credited
+here anyway, because somebody drew the world properly and that deserves saying.
+`tools/map.py` reads them and writes `src/game/board.json`.
+
+**The grouping is ours**: which countries and provinces make up each of the
+forty-two territories, where the board's line down the Urals falls, and which
+pieces are left off the map. So are the projection, the simplification and
+every color drawn on top.
+
+The **topology**, which territory borders which, is the classic board's. It's
+a fact about a published game, typed out by hand in `src/game/map.ts` and
+checked against itself.
+
+## What is ours
+
+Everything else: the rules engine, the odds, the bots and their reasoning, the
+interface, the sound effects and the music, and every word on screen.
+
+## License
+
+Copyright (C) 2026 John Coffey.
+
+This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
+the terms of the **GNU Affero General Public License** as published by the
+Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
+any later version. See [LICENSE](LICENSE).
+
+AGPL rather than plain GPL because this is served over a network. Section 13
+means anyone who runs a modified copy of this for other people over a network
+has to offer them its source.
+
+This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
+WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
+
+*None of the above is legal advice.*