Trakjun

Your town is one great chassis of stacked decks, carrying anything from a hundred people to twenty thousand across Europe, North Africa and the Near East, two thousand years from now.

Fuel, food, water and metal are always short. Other cities are hungry. The map you start with is wrong. Most of a game is the long crossing, run fast through empty days; then something shows on the horizon, and you slow the clock to watch it come.

A hunt takes days to arrive.

Towns eat towns. A predator is seen long before it strikes, and you have time to run, to bargain, or to turn and fight with guns, outriders and minefields.

1. Days outSmoke on the horizon, keeping its distance.
2. ThenTraders say it has been asking after you.
3. ThenFresh ruts across your course, and a stripped husk.
4. ContactFull steam, if your stokers will give it.

You ring for full steam. The stokers decide how full.

The telegraph, the helm, the laws and the build orders are yours, and each one is a request to the crew. People carry them out, or don't. When a group has had enough, it names its price, and you grant it, refuse it, or break them by force. Each answer is remembered.

Every room is weight you have to drag.

Lay out quarters, works, engines and guns deck by deck. Mass sets your speed, heavy rooms need something to stand on, and the boilers have to be fed. To climb a ridge or outrun a hunter you may have to strip a deck and leave its iron on the steppe. You mark what you want built; the crew build it, with the labour and metal you have.

The map is two thousand years out of date.

You set out with a pre-collapse atlas of the real Earth, built from real elevation. The seas have fallen back, the rivers are dry beds and most of the old cities are rubble. Only what your lookouts have seen is certain. Rumour goes stale, and the lake on the map may be a salt flat you can cross.

Some places, then and now

Atlas	Now
Paris	Parry
Rome	Rummer
Moscow	Kremmel
Cairo	Masr
Amsterdam	Mokum
Budapest	Peshed

Navigators ink names as they hear them, so two maps may not agree.

Take a town, and its people come aboard.

Scrap is welcome, but people are the prize, and the problem. Each people keeps the town it came from, its trade, its faith and its grudge. Over decades your city becomes a record of what it has swallowed. A grudge that had cooled flares again when its people come in sight of home, and they may rise and go over the side.

The town's own voice changes with them. After the same boarding:

You hear the city before you read it.

The navigator, the chief engineer, the lookouts and the gunners report as they work. What they notice is what you know: smoke that wasn't there this morning, ground too soft for your weight, an engine giving all it has.

Start as one of three towns, or found your own.

Trakjun is being built now.

Testers are playing it between builds. Leave an address and we'll write three times at most: when the store page opens, when there is a demo, and when it is out.

Platforms Win · Mac · LinuxPlayers Single player