Home · Fan tributes · The Last Kingdom · Hold the Wall

Six waves · Three wounds · No timer · Unofficial fan tribute

Hold the Wall

You are one man in a shield wall, and the wall is the only thing between your side and a bad afternoon. They come at a walk and finish at a run. Every push, the man opposite tells you what he is about to do — and you have to still be reading him on the fortieth push, with your arm dead and your feet sliding. Six waves. Three wounds. No reflexes required.

Forming the line…

How a shield wall actually works

Not by speed. A wall is won by men who keep their feet and keep reading, long after it stops being interesting. So this is not a game about fast hands — there is no timer on any push and nothing is ever taken from you for hesitating. It is a game about whether you are still paying attention on the fortieth push, when the answer is one you already know.

There are three things the man opposite can do, and one answer to each. He lifts the axe overhead: brace, and take it on the boss. He drops his shoulder to drive in: shove, and meet him coming. The man beside him stumbles and a gap opens: stab, and put your spear through it before it closes. You will know all three inside one wave. Knowing them is not the difficulty.

Six waves, three wounds

Each wave is eight pushes. Read wrong and you take a wound; three and the wall goes down with you in it. Read right and the line holds, and holding is the whole of the job — a shield wall does not advance, it refuses to move, and eventually the other side decides it has had enough. Get through all six waves and they walk away from a line that would not break.

Beside you on your shield side is a huscarl who has done this before. He says one thing a wave. He is not anybody from anything — he is the man on your shield side, which is the oldest job in a wall and belongs to nobody.

The same fight for everybody, today

The order of the pushes comes from the date, so every player anywhere gets the same fight on the same day and can argue about the same wave. Stand again after you finish and you get a fresh one.

It runs in your browser and stays there

No account, no sign-in, no network. Your stand is a short code you can share; the link opens on what you did. There is no code on this page that could send anything anywhere — pages in this corner are forbidden to make requests at all, and a test enforces that rather than anybody remembering.

The wall is drawn with a 3D engine, and if your browser will not give the page a canvas the game does not care: the push is described in words and the three answers are buttons. It is the same fight either way.

Argue about it in the forum

The board's forum has a room for this. Post the wave you went down on and be told, at length, exactly which push you misread.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan game inspired by The Last Kingdom — the television series and the novels of Bernard Cornwell it is based on — naming the work, its setting and its premise under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Carnival Film & Television, Netflix, or Bernard Cornwell and his publishers.

Every line of text in this game was written fresh for it. No dialogue, novel text, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series or book is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Last Kingdom. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The rest of the corner

The Last Kingdom wing has Lord of Bebbanburg, the trivia rounds and the character pages. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill and Fringe wings alongside this one, and the free tools that are not about anybody's fiction. If you would rather play something with a map in it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.

Iron Realms is an original work of fantasy strategy. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any other game or franchise, and “Iron Realms” is a working project name rather than necessarily the final title. Its lore, names and artwork are original or used under CC0/CC-BY/OFL licences (see the in-game Credits). The community section also hosts unofficial fan tributes — quizzes and diversions made for fun, not part of the game — which name other fictional worlds under their own labels and are likewise not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to their rights holders. Pre-alpha, built in public. Nothing is for sale. No payment is accepted, and any price named here describes the intended model only. This is an early build — features, balance and prices are conceptual and may change or disappear between visits, and progress may be reset. Treat anything here as work in progress rather than a promise. Every page here is recorded: a first-party cookie, your IP address, your device and where you came from, and — when you are signed in — your account, are logged for site analytics; see what we record and why.