Ho, Wizard! Do you enjoy commanding minions from atop piles of gold? Do you want to win up to $2000 in prizes, get a new job at a tech company, or have your defeated foes bow before you? Then play Greed, CodeCombat’s new multiplayer programming arena level.

Today begins a three-week programming tournament with $40,000 in total prize value. You play as humans or ogres, write code to command your peasants or peons to gather gold and build armies, and watch your code battle its way up the leaderboards.

The Prizes

The top human and top ogre players will each receive cash prizes, unique CodeCombat art, and a bonus of some of the same awesome products and services that power CodeCombat:

The full prize list extends to the top 100 players on each team after removing duplicates when we take a snapshot of submitted code for final verification on Tuesday, June 10, at 5PM PDT (midnight UTC). See the tournament rules here.

The Level

You know the Traveling Salesman Problem? Imagine that, but you’re coordinating multiple salesmen, and there are enemy salesmen, and new cities materializing randomly around you. And the cities are sweet, sweet gold coins. And there’s a magical war going on between you and an enemy Wizard. Actually, between you and every enemy Wizard. (Because you’re a time-traveler.)

That’s Greed, the new tournament level. Easy to play, theoretically impossible to master. Your code will run more often the more efficient it is, so you’ll have to be clever to gain an economic edge and overwhelm your opponent.

The Jobs

When we posted the Gridmancer Challenge, wherein we offered to help skilled players find SF Bay Area tech jobs, we were overwhelmed with solutions. Since then, we’ve scaled up our recruitment process and are ready to help a new batch of Wizards demonstrate their prowess to hungry employers. If you write good code and do well on the Greed leaderboards, we’ll send you an email asking if you’re interested in us finding you your next programming job.

The Languages

In addition to JavaScript, CodeCombat now has experimental support for playing in CoffeeScript, Python, Clojure, and Lua. We ran a parser challenge on ChallengePost that concludes this afternoon, and several open source heroes rose to the challenge to add support for these new programming languages to our transpiler. Winners will be taking home a MacBook Air and some iPad Airs once we judge submissions.

You can access the experimental languages from the editor config in the settings cog of the playback bar. These new languages will be buggy at first, so please add GitHub issues as you notice problems. But who knows–maybe Python’s snaky syntax will give you the sorcerous edge you need to snatch top prize.

Ready to play? Grab your robe and Wizard hat, and head on over to Greed.