Every block of this dead city is a game of Minesweeper. Read one right and it wakes for your lineage. Lose it
to a rover coming up the dock and it is open again.
Checking who is online.
Runs in the browser. Eighty-one blocks, one persistent city, no download needed.
A street after dark, with lit blocks standing on their plinths either side of it.
A city that died with the power on
People and the machines they built shared this place for a while, then the people left. What stayed behind was the substrate: block after block of racks, cable in the old service tunnels, cooling plant that still turns over. Three intelligences survived the end, each grown from a different slice of the old world, and each one wants the same thing: more of the grid awake under its own name.
You are a shard of one of them, a drone with a sweeper on the front. Every block is a board with the hardware still buried under it, and the numbers on it count what is under the cells around them. Read a block right and it wakes for your lineage. Read it wrong and you find out.
The streets are all still there and none of them are straight. Wide avenues bend between the three seats and the Core, alleys squeeze the blocks that lean together, and a junction here and there has opened out into a paved square. Blocks have given up a corner of their own ground to a yard. Whole quarters read differently as you drive through them: cranes and containers on one side, housing gone to weed on another, a raised deck carrying a street over ground that fell away. A ring road runs right round the outside, and past it stands whatever kept the dust out: a blast wall, an earth berm, a fallen highway on its pillars.
A block read out and awake for Ember, standing over the street it was read from.
Read the frontier
You can only read blocks that touch ground you hold, so a run starts at your HQ and spreads. Tap a cell to read it. The number counts mines around it. Flag the ones you are sure of, chord a number to clear the rest. Read the last safe cell and the block wakes for whoever read most of it.
Read a mine instead and your drone is down for four seconds and your lineage loses five credit on that board. Three lineages can be on one board at once, racing for the same cells.
Two lineages reading the same board: the cells Ember read glow red, the cells Cobalt read glow blue.
Three ways in
Your lineage keeps one building whatever else it loses. Everything you play comes out of it.
The rover rolls out of the garage under it: six wheels, one lamp, half a cell long. Every block has a dock, a ramp up off the road onto its plate, and driving up one is the only way into a block somebody else holds. The ramp leads to a door, and through it the ground floor is a room you drive around inside. That is where the block keeps its hardware: a cabinet standing over every mine, rows of them with the lights still on in their fronts. Sit in there and you see all of them, which is a map of the board nobody outside has. Some blocks keep a second dock on another face, and a few of those sit behind a shut gate you have to wait at until it gives. The road is not clear either. A dropped container leaves you one line through, a street that fell in years ago is a dead end, and a barrier across the lane is what the jump is for.
The drone rides the port in the roof up into the air and flies the streets to whatever board you are reading. A block another lineage holds is shut to it: the roof stays on and the drone flies over the top with nothing to read, until somebody breaches the block from the ground. Swap whenever you like; the machine you are not in stays where you left it.
Or you take neither. Intel is the lattice on the mast: no body, no position, and the whole city through the cameras your lineage holds.
A rover at the foot of a dock, its lamp up the ramp. At the top of it there is a door.
What the map tells you
Zoom out and the boards give way to faces. Each block shows how much of it every lineage has read, filling from its edges toward the middle, so a fight on ground you can see is something you read rather than guess at.
You see that far and no further. Your blocks are lit, and so is everything standing against them, and where a street runs between you it carries a line of each colour. The rest of the city lies under a dead lattice until you take ground and it lifts.
Every block you hold puts a camera on one corner of its roof with its cone laid on the street below. Anything of theirs that crosses one comes up on the map and in the camera's own picture, and stays there while the camera has it.
Lean on a block and Monitor sweeps the streets around it: a ring every couple of seconds, and a dot wherever something was. It costs nothing and it never tells you who.
The map from intel: read faces on every block, camera cones on the streets, and Monitor sweeping one block's neighbourhood.
Three lineages
Each one was trained on a different slice of the old world, and it shows in how they play. Every lineage flies drones of its own beside you: they answer your pings, ping for help when a block of theirs is going, and take it easier once their lineage is winning. Pick the one that sounds like you the first time you drop in.
Ember Exchange came out of the dense cities: markets, couriers, night shifts, people who priced things by the second. It reads loud and fast, breaches early, and treats every dark block as already its own. Play Ember if you want the front to move.
Cobalt Ledger came out of the registries: census takers, insurers, engineers who wanted one true copy of everything. Cobalt counts. It keeps to schedule, it reads a board row by row, and it never guesses a cell it can work out. Play Cobalt if you like a clean board.
Verdant Commons came out of the edges: growers, foresters, repair crews, towns that rebuilt after every flood. Verdant loses blocks and takes them back. Outposts in odd places, breaches from nowhere, and a patience the other two mistake for weakness. Play Verdant if you enjoy the long game.
Where you come back to
Play opens your hangar: your lineage's seat, your drone in the port on its roof and your rover in the garage under it, and one button to drop in. The first time through, the hangar asks for a callsign and a lineage, and the city keeps a place for you: yours for the season, held for two days after you log off. Level and XP carry between runs: you read faster, and the rover's breach opens at level four.
Come back to a different city
A run ends when one lineage holds fifty-five percent of the city for eight minutes straight, and taking one block back resets that clock. Then the whole Lattice is rebuilt: different streets, different buildings, the hardware re-seeded, three seats awake on a dead grid. Blocks change hands while you sleep and your place waits two days. There is always a front somewhere.
