Est. 1879 · an informal map, drawn in dirt with a stick
Every novel here comes with a world you can walk into and a game that teaches the one mechanism the book is actually about. The fiction carries the argument. The game makes you feel the arithmetic.
A colony that must choose who gets to found it will discover that the choosing is the catastrophe, not the scarcity that forced it.
Teaches A small founding population loses variance no matter how carefully you select it — and the careful selecting is what makes the loss worse.
Orbital war does not look like the films. It looks like arithmetic, and the arithmetic runs out before the courage does.
Teaches You do not lose because your interceptors miss. You lose because you run out of them — magazine depth beats engagement envelope, and saturation is arithmetic.
Every world you can survive on is a world you are already changing, and the bill for the change arrives on a schedule nobody is still watching.
Teaches Introduce one organism into a closed web and the second-order effects arrive long after you have stopped watching for them.
A mud map is a rough guide scratched in the dirt for someone who does not know the country. It never claimed to be survey-grade. That is the honest posture for fiction that teaches: the model is simplified, the simplifications are stated out loud, and what you are left holding is a shape you can reason with rather than a set of facts to take on trust.
Every game on this site ends the same way — with a card telling you what was faithful and what was cut. The map is not the ground, and we would rather say so than have you find out.