Every block of this dead city is a game of Minesweeper. Read one right and it wakes for your lineage. Keep it
fed with trucks or it goes dark again.
Checking who is online.
Runs in the browser. Eighty-one blocks, one persistent city, no download needed.
Trucks come up the road with their headlights on, past a block standing on its plinth above the street.
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, coolant trenches where the rivers ran, cable in the old service tunnels. 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 and a satchel of mines on the back. Every block is a board of buried ordnance the last people left as a parting gift, 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.
An Ember block read out and burning supply, with a Cobalt board being read across the street.
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, your lineage loses five credit on that board, and half the mines you carried are gone. 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.
Keep it fed
An awake block burns supply. Your HQ and your depots send trucks down the streets, headlights on, to whichever block is closest to going dark, and a truck restores forty-five points. When a block hits zero it goes dark, its armory is lost, and the roof closes over it again.
Streets are the front. Bury a mine on a street next to your block and the next enemy truck over it is gone. Stand at the kerb as one passes and you can raid it. Point your lineage's next truck at a block from its card when it matters, and ping a block in trouble: a pillar of light goes up over it and your lineage comes.
Trucks on the street between awake blocks. Every one of them can be mined or raided.
Three kinds of block
Datacenters count toward the win. Fabs make a mine every forty seconds while they are awake. Depots add a truck and send trucks out from the front. You can tell them apart from the street: a datacenter is a long hall with coolers on the roof, a fab carries a chimney stack, a depot has an open bay onto the road. Every push is a choice: compute now, or the means to hold more later.
A few datacenters stand under one roof with their neighbour, the street between them left open as a covered yard for the trucks. It is still two blocks and two boards, and two lineages can end up holding one building.
One building over two blocks, the yard running through the middle of it, with woken blocks all round.
Everything here is trapped
The old mines are still under every board, and the ones you dig out go into the armory for you to lay again. Bury one on a street and the next enemy truck over it is gone; bury them in your own ground and they arm on whoever cuts their way in. Cut into a block your neighbour holds and its board is live again. When it is one of yours being taken, a red band runs round the plinth wall, and you can see that from streets away. Feed enough mines to a siege core and every block around it goes dark at once.
A Cobalt core lit and armed, and the red band on the Ember plinth beside it. When the timer runs out every block around it goes dark.
What you can carry
Every cell you read pays scrap, and the requisition turns it into six things you take back out. A probe tests one cell without setting it off. A shield eats the next blast and leaves you flying. A jammer locks the other lineages out of the board you are standing on. A sweep drone goes out and reads the cells it can prove are safe. A Breach Charge takes the block next door off whoever holds it, and a siege core sends every block around it dark.
Requisition: spend scrap on gear, switch kit, go back out.
Hold the grid
The run ends when one lineage holds fifty-five percent of the awake city for eight minutes straight. The lineage in front throws a beam off its tower that the whole city can see, and everyone watches the same clock. One cut supply line, one block going dark, and it resets. After six hours the whole grid starts draining twice as fast, so long stalemates break themselves.
When the clock runs out, the winning lineage folds the whole Lattice into one long run about everything it knows, and the grid re-terraforms. New trenches, new bridges, new barricades, the mines re-seeded, three HQs awake on a dead city. Same feud, different map.
Ember holds the city with under eight minutes on the clock. Cut one supply line and it goes back to eight.
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. Its trucks run to schedule, its mines go down on a grid, 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, sieges from nowhere, and a patience the other two mistake for weakness. Play Verdant if you enjoy the long game.
Grow into a kit
Everyone starts in a Sweeper, reading cells and holding a block. At level 2 Requisition opens the other two bodies, and you can switch whenever you like.
Sweeper, Scout and Sapper on one block, left to right.
Sweeper is the one on the left, the body everyone starts in. It reads faster than the others and takes more scrap out of every cell.
Scout is the light one in the middle. It crosses the city twice as fast and sees enemy drones on the map.
Sapper is the one on the right with the drums on its back. It carries twice the mines and buries them twice as fast.
Your seat in the city
Play opens your hangar: your drone on the floor, the city as it stands right now, and one button to drop in. The first time through, the hangar asks for a callsign and a lineage, and the city keeps a seat for you: yours for the season, held for two days after you log off. Level and XP carry between runs and shorten your cooldowns; scrap resets every session.
Come back to a different city
The grid you leave tonight will not be the grid you find tomorrow. Blocks change hands while you sleep, your seat waits two days, and when a lineage finally folds the run, the whole Lattice is rebuilt. There is always a front somewhere.
