DEAD LATTICE

Sweep.
Claim.
Hold.

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.

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

A wide street at night running between two lit Ember blocks on their plinths
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.

An Ember block read out on its plinth, with the crossing and the wide street below it
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 the racks in the cells 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.

What you are reading around is compute. Every block is a room full of racks, and the whole game is finding out where they are without putting a drone through one. Three lineages can be on one board at once, racing for the same cells.

An Ember drone and a Cobalt drone on the same block, its read cells split red and blue
Two lineages reading the same board: the cells Ember read glow red, the cells Cobalt read glow blue.

Hit a rack and you break it

Open the wrong cell and the rack under it goes. It burns red on the deck, throws sparks for the rest of the run, and your drone sits stunned over it for four seconds while everyone else keeps reading.

The rack stays broken. When the block wakes it wakes with the damage still in it, and a block is only worth the racks in it that still run — so a lineage that read carelessly takes home less than the one that read slowly. The count is on the block card: racks running, racks down.

A block read open with rows of cabinets on its deck and some of them burning red on broken cells
Cabinets standing over a block's cells. The red ones are racks a drone opened the hard way.

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 on every rack, rows of them with the lights still on in their fronts. Sit in there and you see all of them, and so does anyone watching through your lineage's cameras. From the air the same block is numbers and guesses. 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.

One cabinet in that room carries the block's key, and nothing in there says which. Stop against one and read it. Two and a half seconds later you know: the ones you have read go dark, and when the right one answers it lights green and the rest of your lineage is told. Then you hold at it for four more seconds and leave a trojan on it. Nothing visible happens. The door stays shut, nobody is told, and their cameras either saw your car in the room or they did not. From then on your side can cut that building open whenever it suits, from a console on the other side of the city.

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 on your side fires a trojan into it. Swap whenever you like; the machine you are not in stays where you left it.

Or you take neither. The daemon is the lattice on the mast: no body, no position, and the whole city through the cameras your lineage holds. It is also the finger on the trigger: every trojan your rovers leave out there is a building it can open, at the moment it chooses. And it is the side that gets swept — pick one of your own blocks, look through it for malware, and if something is in there, name the cabinet and send a car to pull it off before they use it.

An Ember rover at the foot of a dock ramp, its lamp up the ramp at the doorway in the building above it
A rover at the foot of a dock, its lamp up the ramp. At the top of it there is a door, and behind that a room of cabinets with one key in it.

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 carries two cameras: one on the roof watching the streets it is approached by, one inside watching the floor its cabinets stand on. Anything of theirs that crosses a cone comes up on the map and in that 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.

Every picture keeps the last minute. Stop it on the moment something crossed the cone, step back half a minute, run it forward, and press Live when you want the street as it is now. Swap to the camera inside and you are looking at their cabinets while they think nobody is.

The city map with each block's face filled by what the lineages have read of it, camera cones lying on the streets, and a sweep ring rolling out of one held block
The map as a daemon sees it: read faces on every block, camera cones on the streets, and Monitor sweeping one block's neighbourhood.

Repair what you hold

Broken racks are not lost, they are down. Pick a block your lineage holds from the console and its walls come down for you alone: the floor is laid out as a plan with a spot on every rack in it, the broken ones beating red. Pick one and press Repair, and twenty seconds later that cabinet is running again.

One rack at a time, and a cut into the block cancels the work, so a room read carelessly is a while being put right. The same console reads a block for malware and says which cabinet is carrying it. That is why somebody wants the seat.

A block read from the console: its walls down, its cells laid out as a plan with a spot on every rack, five of them red, and a panel open on the one picked
A block Ember holds, read from the console. Five racks down across it, and the one picked is twenty seconds of repair on its own.

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.