A leaderboard with a price tag

The idea

Attention is already bought and sold everywhere online, usually through an auction nobody gets to see. NatWars runs the same auction in public: the number next to your product is exactly what you paid for the position, and anyone can read it.

The country layer is what makes it a game instead of an ad slot. Pick a flag and your money stops being only about your own rank — it becomes your country's score, sitting next to 249 others. People will spend more to beat a neighbour than they ever would to beat a stranger.

Why it resets every Monday

A leaderboard that never resets belongs to whoever showed up first with the most money, and everyone else stops looking. Wiping the board weekly means the top spot is always winnable, the price of #1 starts at $5 again, and there is a new champion to argue about every seven days.

Nothing is lost in the reset. Every finished season keeps its full standings in the Hall of Fame, and champions keep a crown that follows them into later seasons.

Where the money goes

Into running the site. NatWars is not a charity drive and does not claim to be — you are paying for a rank on a public leaderboard and the traffic that comes with it. Payments are final. That is stated plainly in the rules because the whole model falls apart if it is buried.

So far

• $16 raised across every season
• 4 paid bids
• 3 listings ever on the board
• 250 countries eligible to fight

How it is built

Next.js on Vercel, Firestore for the board, Polar for payments. There are no user accounts anywhere in the system: a listing is identified by its normalized URL, so the same product always lands on the same row no matter who pays for it.

Rank is not stored in the database. It is derived from the amounts every time the board is read, which is why two people paying for #1 at the same instant cannot corrupt anything — the order is a pure function of the money.