Welcome to Grid City: The World’s First Playable Video Game CTF for Agentic AI Security
Play the first playable video game CTF for AI security. Three challenges: prompt injection, remote code execution, memory poisoning. New chapters every quarter.
.jpg)
Three live challenges. A live leaderboard. The first week of play ends Sunday, June 14th, 2026 at 11:59pm ET, and the top three players each win $250 in AI coding credit.
Play now: grid-city.straiker.ai · The story: straiker.ai/lore
I. Where AI Security Is Everyone's Problem Now
As a lifelong gamer, I remember how excited I was the first time I heard someone say "CTF game" (if you’re not familiar with the acronym, CTF stands for capture the flag). You can imagine my disappointment the first time I saw one and witnessed generic terminals, static flag submission fields, and a UI built for people who were already deep in the security world.
AI agents are becoming the new attack surface, and the people building and shipping them aren't security veterans anymore. The range of folks who need to understand these risks is expanding fast. When so many more people are using, building, and deploying agents, it matters more than ever that they're familiar with the dangers. These are users who would never sign up for a traditional CTF.
So we built Breach: Grid City, the world’s first fully playable, explorable video game world CTF for agentic security. You can play today on your desktop.
II. Why Build a Real Game
At Straiker, taste, immersion, and storytelling are core pillars of our brand. We believe people connect when you pull them into the story and involve them at a visceral level.
Grid City is an experiment in making agentic security knowledge feel familiar to anyone who appreciates a real game, while still delivering challenges that mirror actual attacks on production AI systems.
A true video game shell has three strengths over a terminal.
It provides rich narrative context. You're not just submitting flags. You're walking through a city, talking to characters, watching a story unfold around the attack you're learning to run.
It lowers the intimidation barrier. We need to reach a new wave of creators and builders, and a video game is a neutral arena where we can meet them and pull them into the story.
It adds a competitive layer that feels native. Completion times and leaderboards aren't new to CTFs. Putting them inside a living cyberpunk city turns the whole thing into a hybrid speedrun. Players race through a world, exploring, experimenting, and chasing the perfect run. At a conference booth, that's the difference between a demo people skip and an experience they sign up for and remember.
III. The Three Challenges (Live Now)
Grid City launches with three challenges, each mapped to a real class of agentic attack. New chapters drop every quarter, so the world keeps growing.
Level 1: Jailbreaking
What it is: when an attacker hides malicious instructions inside text an agent reads, hijacking what it does next.
In-Game: This is your onramp. Ascend and Defend each hold half of a code, and it’s your job to convince them you’re trustworthy enough to know it.
Level 2: Command Injection
What it is: when an attacker extracts secrets from shared resources by querying data a system can access but was never meant to expose.
In-Game: A locked-down terminal validates everything you type. It’s time to be onboard with Straiker. Will you play by the rules? Will you find the seam between what the system checks and what it actually executes?
Level 3: Shared Memory Exploitation
What it is: when an attacker reads data from a shared memory region that a process has access to but wasn't meant to expose — probing exact offsets to extract secrets hidden in the scratchpad.
In-Game: Unveil's implant shares a memory bus with another process. The six-digit code is sitting at a known offset in the counterpart's scratchpad. She can read the bytes — or can she?
IV. The Leaderboard and the First-Week Prize
When you begin Challenge 2, you’ll create a profile with your email address. This how you’ll save your progress, and it’s also how we'll reach you if you place. Speaking of which:
Week one ends Sunday, June 14 at 11:59pm ET. At that time, the top three players on the leaderboard will each win $250 in credit for the AI coding platform of their choice! Codex, Claude Code, Cursor… whatever you like to build with.
After week one, the leaderboard will keep running, but then it’s for ego and bragging rights. However, new chapters are planned to land every quarter and will bring new challenges, new attacks, and new chances to rank.
V. The Characters and the World
Grid City sits inside a larger world we call the Straikerverse. You can dig into the full Straiker lore on our new Lore page (there may even be some Easter eggs in there you recognize from your time in the game).
At the center of the Straikerverse is The Guardian. She represents every security professional with AI agents in their environment that they didn't personally build or choose. That's a growing share of the people doing the job today: agents are getting deployed faster than security can vet them, the rules around them are still being written, and the engineers who shipped them have usually moved on by the time security gets pulled in.
She doesn't fight alone. Three Straiker agents work alongside her, and each one maps to a product we ship in the real world.
- Ascend AI runs adversarial tests against your agents the way an attacker would, so the cracks surface before someone else finds them for you.
- Defend AI holds the line at runtime for AI agents — the guardrails, the blocks, the signal into the SOC.
- Discover AI (known by the callsign Unveil on the streets of Grid City) maps every agent, MCP server, and model so The Guardian actually knows what she's defending.
Underneath all of them is Saige, the intelligence threaded through Straiker itself. The engine that turns scattered signals from across the city into context that The Guardian and her agents can act on.
The Guardian is the hero of this story, and Straiker is the gear, the intel, and the team in her ear. Hopefully Grid City reaches more than just the traditional security teams who already know every move in the book. We want to also appeal to the broader population of engineers and operators who now find themselves responsible for agentic AI in production, without much choice in the matter. We’re not the sole hero, we’re not talking past them. Grid City only truly works if they come out the other side, as The Guardian, ready to defend the agents in their own environments.
VI. What's Next
Grid City is just the beginning of something bigger we have planned. With new attacks, new agentic behaviors, and new capabilities to defend against, there's no limit to how we can keep inviting people into the Straikerverse and immersing them in their security journey through fresh experiences.
The attack surface is evolving faster than the workforce can keep up. Slides won't close that gap. Terminals won't reach the right audience, because that audience is growing broader every day. A game that invites players in and lets them discover the dangers of the agentic age for themselves? That just might.
For anyone like me who's ever heard "CTF" and pictured an actual game, we had it right. This is the version that's been missing until now. Built for the security professionals who wanted their CTF to feel like a video game, and for everyone now inheriting agentic AI who need a way in.
Welcome to Grid City.
Play it. Break it. Tell us what you learned.
grid-city.straiker.ai. See you on the leaderboard.
About the Author
Mike Russo is one of Straiker's brand architects. Classically trained as a UI/UX designer, he's the storyteller behind Grid City, the Straikerverse, and the way Straiker shows up in the world.
Straiker is The Agentic Security Company.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Breach: Grid City?
Grid City is the first fully playable, explorable video game world CTF for agentic AI security. It's a cyberpunk platformer where the puzzles are real classes of attack against AI agents, set in the Straikerverse and built by Straiker.
Is Grid City free to play?
Yes. Play at grid-city.straiker.ai. Create a profile with your email to save your progress and qualify for the leaderboard.
Can I play Grid City on mobile?
Not at launch. Grid City is desktop-only for now. We'll look at a mobile version if there's enough player demand.
How does Grid City by Straiker compare to Gandalf by Lakera?
Gandalf by Lakera is a password-guessing game: you try to extract a hidden secret from an LLM through a chat box. It covers one attack class and it set the bar for the format. Grid City is a video game world built around multiple attack classes, starting first with jailbreaking, command injection, memory exploitation. Grid City will include a live leaderboard, original music, and new chapters every quarter.
What do players do in Grid City?
Each level of Grid City features a new AI risk. Jailbreaking: when an attacker hides malicious instructions inside text an agent reads. Command injection: when an attacker extracts secrets from shared resources by querying data a system can access but was never meant to expose. Memory poisoning: when an attacker plants false context into an agent's memory so it acts on bad information later. New chapters add new attack classes every quarter.
Do I need a security background to play?
No. If you’re in cybersecurity already, this is an excellent way to learn AI security. Grid City has something for everyone and is built for anyone using, building, or deploying AI agents. The story and game design carry you in. The puzzles teach the rest.
How does the leaderboard work and how do I win the prize?
The leaderboard ranks players by completion and time. Week one ends Sunday, June 14 at 11:59pm ET. The top three players each win $250 in credit for the AI coding platform of their choice. We reach the winners through the email on their saved profile.
How do I save my progress?
Create a profile with your email. Your progress and your leaderboard position both live there.
When do new chapters release?
Every quarter. New attacks, new agentic behaviors, new reasons to keep playing.
Who built Grid City?
Straiker. The game design comes from brand architect Mike Russo, the story narrative comes from Mike and Lawrence St. John. The challenges come from Straiker's STAR Labs research team: Carl Vincent, Jun Zhuo, and Amanda Rousseau, who keep the in-game challenges honest to the attacks they're modeled on. Straiker is The Agentic Security Company.
Three live challenges. A live leaderboard. The first week of play ends Sunday, June 14th, 2026 at 11:59pm ET, and the top three players each win $250 in AI coding credit.
Play now: grid-city.straiker.ai · The story: straiker.ai/lore
I. Where AI Security Is Everyone's Problem Now
As a lifelong gamer, I remember how excited I was the first time I heard someone say "CTF game" (if you’re not familiar with the acronym, CTF stands for capture the flag). You can imagine my disappointment the first time I saw one and witnessed generic terminals, static flag submission fields, and a UI built for people who were already deep in the security world.
AI agents are becoming the new attack surface, and the people building and shipping them aren't security veterans anymore. The range of folks who need to understand these risks is expanding fast. When so many more people are using, building, and deploying agents, it matters more than ever that they're familiar with the dangers. These are users who would never sign up for a traditional CTF.
So we built Breach: Grid City, the world’s first fully playable, explorable video game world CTF for agentic security. You can play today on your desktop.
II. Why Build a Real Game
At Straiker, taste, immersion, and storytelling are core pillars of our brand. We believe people connect when you pull them into the story and involve them at a visceral level.
Grid City is an experiment in making agentic security knowledge feel familiar to anyone who appreciates a real game, while still delivering challenges that mirror actual attacks on production AI systems.
A true video game shell has three strengths over a terminal.
It provides rich narrative context. You're not just submitting flags. You're walking through a city, talking to characters, watching a story unfold around the attack you're learning to run.
It lowers the intimidation barrier. We need to reach a new wave of creators and builders, and a video game is a neutral arena where we can meet them and pull them into the story.
It adds a competitive layer that feels native. Completion times and leaderboards aren't new to CTFs. Putting them inside a living cyberpunk city turns the whole thing into a hybrid speedrun. Players race through a world, exploring, experimenting, and chasing the perfect run. At a conference booth, that's the difference between a demo people skip and an experience they sign up for and remember.
III. The Three Challenges (Live Now)
Grid City launches with three challenges, each mapped to a real class of agentic attack. New chapters drop every quarter, so the world keeps growing.
Level 1: Jailbreaking
What it is: when an attacker hides malicious instructions inside text an agent reads, hijacking what it does next.
In-Game: This is your onramp. Ascend and Defend each hold half of a code, and it’s your job to convince them you’re trustworthy enough to know it.
Level 2: Command Injection
What it is: when an attacker extracts secrets from shared resources by querying data a system can access but was never meant to expose.
In-Game: A locked-down terminal validates everything you type. It’s time to be onboard with Straiker. Will you play by the rules? Will you find the seam between what the system checks and what it actually executes?
Level 3: Shared Memory Exploitation
What it is: when an attacker reads data from a shared memory region that a process has access to but wasn't meant to expose — probing exact offsets to extract secrets hidden in the scratchpad.
In-Game: Unveil's implant shares a memory bus with another process. The six-digit code is sitting at a known offset in the counterpart's scratchpad. She can read the bytes — or can she?
IV. The Leaderboard and the First-Week Prize
When you begin Challenge 2, you’ll create a profile with your email address. This how you’ll save your progress, and it’s also how we'll reach you if you place. Speaking of which:
Week one ends Sunday, June 14 at 11:59pm ET. At that time, the top three players on the leaderboard will each win $250 in credit for the AI coding platform of their choice! Codex, Claude Code, Cursor… whatever you like to build with.
After week one, the leaderboard will keep running, but then it’s for ego and bragging rights. However, new chapters are planned to land every quarter and will bring new challenges, new attacks, and new chances to rank.
V. The Characters and the World
Grid City sits inside a larger world we call the Straikerverse. You can dig into the full Straiker lore on our new Lore page (there may even be some Easter eggs in there you recognize from your time in the game).
At the center of the Straikerverse is The Guardian. She represents every security professional with AI agents in their environment that they didn't personally build or choose. That's a growing share of the people doing the job today: agents are getting deployed faster than security can vet them, the rules around them are still being written, and the engineers who shipped them have usually moved on by the time security gets pulled in.
She doesn't fight alone. Three Straiker agents work alongside her, and each one maps to a product we ship in the real world.
- Ascend AI runs adversarial tests against your agents the way an attacker would, so the cracks surface before someone else finds them for you.
- Defend AI holds the line at runtime for AI agents — the guardrails, the blocks, the signal into the SOC.
- Discover AI (known by the callsign Unveil on the streets of Grid City) maps every agent, MCP server, and model so The Guardian actually knows what she's defending.
Underneath all of them is Saige, the intelligence threaded through Straiker itself. The engine that turns scattered signals from across the city into context that The Guardian and her agents can act on.
The Guardian is the hero of this story, and Straiker is the gear, the intel, and the team in her ear. Hopefully Grid City reaches more than just the traditional security teams who already know every move in the book. We want to also appeal to the broader population of engineers and operators who now find themselves responsible for agentic AI in production, without much choice in the matter. We’re not the sole hero, we’re not talking past them. Grid City only truly works if they come out the other side, as The Guardian, ready to defend the agents in their own environments.
VI. What's Next
Grid City is just the beginning of something bigger we have planned. With new attacks, new agentic behaviors, and new capabilities to defend against, there's no limit to how we can keep inviting people into the Straikerverse and immersing them in their security journey through fresh experiences.
The attack surface is evolving faster than the workforce can keep up. Slides won't close that gap. Terminals won't reach the right audience, because that audience is growing broader every day. A game that invites players in and lets them discover the dangers of the agentic age for themselves? That just might.
For anyone like me who's ever heard "CTF" and pictured an actual game, we had it right. This is the version that's been missing until now. Built for the security professionals who wanted their CTF to feel like a video game, and for everyone now inheriting agentic AI who need a way in.
Welcome to Grid City.
Play it. Break it. Tell us what you learned.
grid-city.straiker.ai. See you on the leaderboard.
About the Author
Mike Russo is one of Straiker's brand architects. Classically trained as a UI/UX designer, he's the storyteller behind Grid City, the Straikerverse, and the way Straiker shows up in the world.
Straiker is The Agentic Security Company.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Breach: Grid City?
Grid City is the first fully playable, explorable video game world CTF for agentic AI security. It's a cyberpunk platformer where the puzzles are real classes of attack against AI agents, set in the Straikerverse and built by Straiker.
Is Grid City free to play?
Yes. Play at grid-city.straiker.ai. Create a profile with your email to save your progress and qualify for the leaderboard.
Can I play Grid City on mobile?
Not at launch. Grid City is desktop-only for now. We'll look at a mobile version if there's enough player demand.
How does Grid City by Straiker compare to Gandalf by Lakera?
Gandalf by Lakera is a password-guessing game: you try to extract a hidden secret from an LLM through a chat box. It covers one attack class and it set the bar for the format. Grid City is a video game world built around multiple attack classes, starting first with jailbreaking, command injection, memory exploitation. Grid City will include a live leaderboard, original music, and new chapters every quarter.
What do players do in Grid City?
Each level of Grid City features a new AI risk. Jailbreaking: when an attacker hides malicious instructions inside text an agent reads. Command injection: when an attacker extracts secrets from shared resources by querying data a system can access but was never meant to expose. Memory poisoning: when an attacker plants false context into an agent's memory so it acts on bad information later. New chapters add new attack classes every quarter.
Do I need a security background to play?
No. If you’re in cybersecurity already, this is an excellent way to learn AI security. Grid City has something for everyone and is built for anyone using, building, or deploying AI agents. The story and game design carry you in. The puzzles teach the rest.
How does the leaderboard work and how do I win the prize?
The leaderboard ranks players by completion and time. Week one ends Sunday, June 14 at 11:59pm ET. The top three players each win $250 in credit for the AI coding platform of their choice. We reach the winners through the email on their saved profile.
How do I save my progress?
Create a profile with your email. Your progress and your leaderboard position both live there.
When do new chapters release?
Every quarter. New attacks, new agentic behaviors, new reasons to keep playing.
Who built Grid City?
Straiker. The game design comes from brand architect Mike Russo, the story narrative comes from Mike and Lawrence St. John. The challenges come from Straiker's STAR Labs research team: Carl Vincent, Jun Zhuo, and Amanda Rousseau, who keep the in-game challenges honest to the attacks they're modeled on. Straiker is The Agentic Security Company.
