Season OneAnnouncementLaunch
The game is out.
After a long build and a longer review queue, Orion Backgammon is downloadable. The door at orion.arthea.ai/go carries the App Store and Google Play links and always shows what is available right now for the device you are holding, which is a more honest answer than anything we could freeze into a sentence here.
Season One, The First Crossing, opens on 1 September 2026.
When does Season One start?
1 September 2026. That is the day the ladder starts counting for the season: leagues, trophies, the season pass and the climb from Driftwood to Orion all begin together, for everyone, on the same board.
We chose a date rather than opening the season the instant the stores approved us, and the reason is fairness. A season that begins at approval begins at a different moment in every country, and the players who happened to be awake would have had a head start on a ladder that is supposed to start level. A named day removes that. Nobody is early.
What can I do before 1 September?
Everything except climb. Download the game, play real matches against real opponents, learn the doubling cube against someone who will punish you for it, visit the destinations, set up your profile and find your friends. The rules engine, the matchmaking and the provably-fair dice are all running today.
What is waiting is the seasonal layer: the ranked ladder for Season One, the pass and its tiers, the season's trophies. Those arrive on the first.
Do trophies carry over from before the season?
There is nothing to carry. Season One starts every player at zero trophies, on the same day, on the same board. That was true when we wrote it before launch and it is true now: the ladder is the record of the season, not of who installed the game first.
A ladder that starts level is the only kind worth climbing.
Is the Founding 1000 still open?
Yes, and it is the one thing that does reward arriving early. The first thousand players of the first crossing keep the Season One premium pass in full, a permanent Founder identity that stays on the account for as long as it exists, and an exclusive board made for the opening of the voyage. The board does not return to the store in a later season and it is not sold when the number is full.
It is a mark, not an advantage. Nothing a founder holds makes the dice kinder or the board easier, because a game with real competition cannot sell the competition. When the count is reached, the Founding 1000 closes for good.
How do I know the dice are fair?
You do not have to take our word for it, and you do not even have to install the game. Before every server-backed match the server publishes a SHA-256 commitment to a secret dice seed. Every roll is derived from that seed with HMAC-SHA256, and the seed is revealed when the game ends, so any roll can be recomputed afterwards and checked against the commitment.
The public verifier at orion.arthea.ai/verify runs that check entirely in your own browser, with no account and no download, and it ships with a demo replay so you can watch a real game be re-derived roll by roll. It has been live since before the game was.
What happens after the first crossing?
The voyage carries on. Twelve destinations are built and waiting, from Hassan's cafe in Tangier to the celestial table that gives the game its name, and Season One is the route that first connects them. Seasons after it will chart their own.
For now there is a board, an opponent somewhere in the world, and a date on the calendar. The door is at orion.arthea.ai/go.