The worm arena glossary

The terms

Arena

The bounded playfield every worm shares. Wormifi's arenas are boards: Open Seas and the Black Pearl Relay.

Bait

Placing your body near dropped mass so a greedy rival's head meets it. The genre's oldest trap.

Boost / Sprint

Trading a resource for speed. In Wormifi: 2.0x speed for 4 size per second, dropped behind you as wake loot.

Capstan

A wrap-and-charge landmark on the Black Pearl Relay board. Wrapping it charges the objective; two exist, Port and Starboard.

Coil

Fully encircling a smaller worm and tightening until it has nowhere left. Famous, slow, and frequently vultured.

Conserved mass

The design law that killed crews and spent sprint drop as real collectable mass instead of vanishing.

Crew

Wormifi's word for your body segments — the living chain behind your head.

Cut

Making a rival's head strike a body. The genre's only verb that matters.

Head

The only vulnerable point of any worm. Everything in the genre is geometry around protecting yours and ambushing theirs.

Hoard

The marked treasure a cut rival drops where it died. Rich, and dangerous to collect — the cutter is usually nearby.

Labeled AI

Bot players wearing an explicit AI tag, so a room's population is never overstated.

Pace

A room-wide speed setting. Wormifi ships Harbor (patient), Classic, and Tempest (high pressure).

Pinch

Closing the open side on a rival whose other exits are already blocked by walls, giants, or your body.

Relic

A time-limited specialist pickup. Example: the Loot Compass, which pulls nearby neutral treasure and your own wake loot.

Server authority

The multiplayer model where one server decides all collisions and every browser renders its verdict.

Snapshot

One server update of the whole room's state. Wormifi's live rooms run 15 per second.

Vulture

Collecting a hoard you didn't earn while the two who fought over it are still untangling.

Wake loot

The trail of spent mass a sprinting worm leaves behind, collectable by anyone, coloured by who paid for it.