How to play

What this is

Three games you can play in a browser tab. Nothing to install, no account, no wallet.

One thing is different about them, and it is the reason they exist. When you take a turn, the game re-runs your move against the rules before it writes anything down. If the move is not allowed it is refused and nothing happens. You cannot talk the page into letting you through. And when a game is over, anyone can replay it from the first move to the last and watch it come out the same way. That is why the daily score board cannot be faked: a submitted run that does not replay correctly is shown as FAIL and never ranks.

That is the whole pitch. It happens in this server and in your own browser tab, not on a blockchain, and no public network is involved.

Two honest warnings first

• By default you are identified by a browser cookie. No password, no email and no recovery. Clear your browser data, or open the site in a private window, and you are a brand-new person with a blank history. Nothing you did before comes back. If a recovery phrase is offered in the navigation, claiming one is what makes an identity survive that; until you claim one, nothing here is durable.
• It is early. No chat, no friends list, no matchmaking. To play a two-player game you open a table and send someone the link yourself. Here on your own? The Descent is a game for one, and on a two-player table you can hold both seats yourself: take one seat, then open the invite in a private window and take the other. And nothing you collect here is money or is for sale.

The Descent

What it is: a solo dungeon crawl with one life, played against a torch that never refills.

What you are trying to do: get down to the bottom floor, pick up the prize that lies there, and climb all the way back out to the surface before your light runs out. The score board calls a run that carries the prize out crowned: that is the whole word, there is nothing else to it.

How a turn works. You press one button, and every button spends light. You have 30 breaths of light for the entire run and there is no way to get more.

• Descend · one floor down, one breath.
• Climb · one floor up, one breath. This is the only way out, which is why the light you have left is never the real number: you also have to afford the climb home. 4 floors down means 4 breaths just to reach the surface.
• Take the relic · pick up what is on this floor, one breath.
• Use a key · three of the eight relics are keys, and a locked way needs the matching key in hand. A key is never hidden behind the door it opens, so every way is openable if you go and get the key first.
• Press the guardian · two breaths, and it costs you nothing else.
• Lunge at the guardian · the same result for one breath, but it permanently costs you one carrying slot for the rest of the run. Cheaper now, worse at the bottom.
• Bank and end the run · only possible standing on the surface. Everything you carried out is yours; everything still down there is gone, and the run is over. There is no second attempt today.

The squeeze. You can hold 8 things, minus how deep you are, minus any lunge damage. So on floor 1 you have 7 slots and on floor 4 you have 4, and at the bottom you need three keys plus the prize, which is exactly 4. So you can never carry a treasure out AND the prize. Every run is the same choice: go for the prize, or come back shallow and full. The dungeon gets stingier the further in you go, on purpose. And that is also what makes a lunge a real decision rather than a free discount, because the slot it costs you is one you needed.

What makes it interesting: everyone in the world gets the same dungeon each day, and the dungeon is drawn from a public random number that nobody, including us, can pick in advance. Today's dungeon was not chosen; it was revealed. There are 16 possible maps, every one of them checked to be beatable, and the best line on any given day spends between 24 and 30 of your 30 breaths. There is almost no slack. Most runs should not make it.

Play The Descent →   See today's finished runs →

Automatafl

What it is: a two-player board game where the piece that decides it is the one neither of you controls.

What you are trying to do: drive the automaton (the single glowing piece) onto one of your own two corners. Each side owns two of the four corners.

How a turn works. You do not take turns. Both players choose a move at the same time, in secret. When you have both chosen, both moves open at once, and then one turn applies both of them.

• The board is 11×11. It holds repulsors (marked R, the pale spiky ones) which push the automaton away, attractors (marked A, the round brass discs) which pull it toward them, and one automaton (marked @, the violet ring, the only thing on the board that glows).
• Pieces move in straight lines only: along a row or along a column, any distance, never diagonally, never onto the automaton. (If you play chess: exactly like a rook.)
• Either player may push any piece. The pieces are not yours or theirs: they are shared. That is the entire source of the tension.
• Once the round resolves, the automaton takes one step: pulled toward attractors and pushed from repulsors along each axis. Get it to your corner and you have won.
• If you both grab the same square, that round does not happen. The contested square is marked with a dead ×, the board freezes exactly where it was, and both of you owe a fresh move that may not use a marked square at either end. The turn counter does not advance until a round comes back clean, and every retry burns a new square, so this cannot go on forever.

What makes it interesting: because you are both moving shared pieces at the same moment, a good move is not the move that helps you; it is the move that still helps you given what they are probably doing to the same board. You are guessing at your opponent rather than waiting on them.

Be clear about the secrecy. While your move is sealed your opponent is not shown it, but the hiding is this server declining to tell them: your move sits here in plain form until you open it. It is hidden from your opponent, not from the server. If you would rather not trust the server with that, do not play here.

Open an Automatafl table →

Multiway-Tug

What it is: a two-player game of hidden influence over 7 guilds. (Guild and lane mean the same thing; guild 3 is lane 3, and the table uses both words.)

What you are trying to do: end the round leading more of the 7 guilds than your opponent, by weight. They are worth 2 2 2 3 3 4 5, and whoever leads a guild takes its whole weight: there is no splitting. The round always plays out in full; then it is decided. You win if you hold 11 weight or 4 guilds; failing that it still comes out one way (on total weight first, guilds held second), and only an exact tie on both is a draw.

How a turn works. You hold six cards, hidden. Your opponent sees only how many you hold, never which. Each card belongs to one guild, and that is the guild it pulls for whoever ends up holding it. There are 21 cards in the deck and none is ever created or destroyed during a round. You get four moves for the whole round, one of each kind, in whatever order you like:

• Play one face down. It stays face down until the very end.
• Burn two. Those two leave the round and score for nobody, ever.
• Lay out three. Your opponent takes one of the three; you get the other two.
• Lay out two pairs. Your opponent takes one pair; you get the other.

On the last two you decide what to put in front of them and they decide which part they take. You can never answer your own offer. That is the game. Then everything turns face up at once: each face-down card lands on its owner's side of its guild, and only then is the leading counted.

The thing that looks broken and is not. Spending a move usually does not move the 7 guild rows at all. A face-down card reaches nobody until the reveal; burnt cards reach nobody ever; a three-card or two-pair offer sits in the middle and only lands when your opponent answers it. So it is completely normal to press a button and see all 7 rows come back identical. What does move is the running account of where all 21 cards are (held, face down, burnt, placed), and the table prints it. If you want to see that your move landed, watch that line rather than the guild rows.

What makes it interesting: on both of the lay-out moves you are choosing how even to make the split. A balanced cut gives away less but gains you less; a lopsided one hands your opponent a real prize if they spot it. You are not so much bluffing about your hand as pricing what you are willing to lose.

Honest about the size of it: a round is one round. There is no match, no best-of, no alternating first move, and the seat that answers the last offer has a measurable advantage. Mechanics derived from Hanamikoji (Kota Nakayama); this is an original re-theming.

Open a Multiway-Tug table →