DEAD LATTICE

Sweep.
Claim.
Hold.

A dead city, three descendants of the last superintelligence, and a grid of numbered blocks that go off if you read them wrong. You fly a drone for one of them. Wake a block cell by cell, run haulers down the streets to keep it fed, and cut your rivals' supply with street mines, raids and siege cores. The city only resets when one lineage holds most of it, and that can take days.

Checking who is online.

Runs in the browser. Eighty-one blocks, one persistent city, no download needed.

The city map with every block coloured by the lineage holding it
The whole city on one screen. Deploy anywhere your lineage can reach.
A single block up close, cells revealed with numbers and flags
One block, ten by ten. The numbers count charges under the neighbours.
A hauler driving along a street between blocks
Haulers leave the root block and drive the old streets with coolant and cards.
The city map on a phone in portrait
The same city on a phone. Tap to read, hold to flag, pinch to look around.

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 charges 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.

A woken block seen from above with its cells lit
Your root block at the start of a run. Eighty more wait out there in the dark.

Read the frontier

Only blocks touching ground you already hold are open to you, so every run starts as a slow crawl outward from your root block. Reveal a cell, flag the ones you are sure about, chord a number to clear the rest around it. Every safe cell you read is one point of credit for your lineage on that board, and the lineage with the most credit when the last safe cell falls wakes the block and digs out its charges.

A wrong read sets a charge off. Your drone is down for four seconds, your lineage loses five credit on that board, and half the charges you were carrying are gone. The crater still counts for the numbers around it, so the board always finishes. Boards are shared and live: three lineages can be reading the same block at once, racing for the same credit.

A drone reading cells on a contested block
Two drones on one board. Whoever reads more of it wakes it.

Say it with a pin

Flags belong to your lineage. When you mark a cell, every drone on your side sees it, and the other two never do. Drop a pin on a block and it shows up on your lineage's map with your callsign on it, which is usually enough to bring two or three drones over without a word. There is a chat too, but most of the talking happens on the board.

Vision works the same way. Enemy drones more than a block away from your ground are not on your map at all. Scouts see one block further and can fire a probe or a recon pulse to reveal what somebody else buried. Information is the resource here; the charges are just what you spend it on.

Drones converging on a pinned block
A pin goes down and the nearest drones turn toward it.

Keep it fed

A woken block burns coolant and cards, and its supply drains from a hundred toward zero. Your lineage runs a fleet of haulers out of its root block, two of them plus one for every four blocks you hold, and each one drives the old streets to whichever block is closest to going dark. A crate restores forty-five points. A block that hits zero goes dark: it drops back to neutral, its cache is lost, and anyone can read it again.

That makes the streets the real front. Bury a charge on a street next to your block and the next enemy hauler over it is scrap. Stand at the curb as one passes and you can cut it open and take the cargo, once every fifteen seconds. The lineage in the lead drains faster and the one trailing drains slower, so nobody gets to sit on a win.

A hauler on a street between two blocks
Every hauler you see is a supply line. Every supply line can be cut.

Old ordnance still works

Charges you dig out of a woken block go into its cache, up to forty per block, and haulers can ship them between your blocks or to the front. Plant them under a contested board to trap the next reader, or in your own ground as fortifications that slow the drain and turn against anyone who breaches you. Breaching reopens a neighbour's block for contest with a fresh layout and a twelve percent head start for the defender.

Then there is the siege core. Build one on a block and feed it charges, by hand or by hauler, while everyone watches the traffic. At eight it darkens every block around it. At twenty-four it reaches two blocks deep. The other lineages can sabotage it, raid the haulers feeding it, or read the block out from under it. And when a front goes quiet, a beacon claims any dark block straight from the map, as long as your haulers can reach it.

A siege core being fed on a contested block
A core at the front. Everyone can see it being fed. Nobody can ignore it.

Hold the grid

The run ends when one lineage holds fifty-five percent of the awake city for eight minutes straight. Everyone sees the 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 charges re-seeded, three root blocks awake on a dead city. Same feud, different map.

Most of the city held by one lineage as the countdown runs
Eight minutes on the clock and one lineage everywhere you look.

Three lineages

Each one was trained on a different slice of the old world, and it shows in how they play. Pick the one that sounds like you the first time you drop in.

Ember Exchange

Raised on the dense cities: markets, couriers, night shifts, the people who priced things by the second. Ember 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

Raised on the registries: census takers, insurers, engineers, archivists who wanted one true copy of everything. Cobalt counts. Its haulers run to schedule, its charges go down on a grid, and it never guesses a cell it can deduce. Play Cobalt if you like a clean board.

Verdant Commons

Raised on the edges: growers, foresters, repair crews, the 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.

Pick a kit

Your drone's body and its two abilities. Switch any time from the requisition screen; the one you fly most will grow on you.

Three drones of different kits working on neighbouring blocks
Sweeper, Scout and Sapper at work. Watch them behind this page.

Your seat in the city

The first time you drop in you pick a callsign, a lineage and a kit, and the city gives you a seat: one of sixteen per lineage per season. Come back within two days and it is still yours, with your level, your stats and your place at the front. Stay away longer and it opens up so your lineage is never stuck with empty chairs.

Level and XP carry between runs. Higher levels shorten your cooldowns and let you carry more charges. Scrap is per session and pays for probes, shields, jammers, breach charges and the siege core itself from the requisition screen. Lifetime claims, raids and cells read feed a leaderboard that survives every reset.

The requisition screen with items and kit switch
Requisition: spend scrap on gear, switch kit, keep going.

Controls

LMB or tapReveal a cell. Tapping a number chords it.
RMB, F, or holdFlag a cell for your lineage.
MMB or SpaceChord the cell under the cursor.
TabMap. Click a block to deploy, drag to pan, wheel or pinch to zoom.
1 to 0Kit abilities, plant, items. Targeted ones arm first, then you click a cell, a street, or a block on the map.
GPing what you are pointing at for your lineage.
PAutopilot. It also kicks in after ninety seconds idle.
B, Enter, MRequisition, lineage chat, mute.

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.