The game

Staying alive

Five vitals: health, hunger, thirst, stamina and spirit. They are not four bars and a lecture — movement speed is the whole economy. Fed and watered you run fast; hungry and thirsty you walk, and everything you do takes longer. Food stores are military supply.

Stamina trains with use. Every sprint, every chop, every fight raises your permanent ceiling a little, so a tribe that works is a tribe that can fight.

Warmth is a condition, not a bar: at night, away from fire, without hide clothing, your stamina recovers at half speed and your health ticks down. Sickness has exactly two causes — dirty water and rotten food. Raw meat spoils inside a day, cooked lasts about two, dried or salted lasts the match.

Fire is a single point of failure

The match opens at night. Lightning takes a tree out of a dry sky and you carry the burning branch home, because until you have made a flint striker there is no way to start a fire from nothing — and an enemy who knows that can attack the one you have.

Every piece of wood you add catches up the stack: the hearth burns as big and as bright as what it has caught, and lasts longer the more it is fed. Bodies catch fire too, from a hearth walked into, a torch, lightning, or a Firekin's blow. Water, rain or rolling puts it out.

Every hearth in the open sends up a column of smoke by day and a glow by night — unless its tribe has charted a smokeless fire. Warmth, cooking and safety, all advertising your position.

Everything is made by hand

Sit down and the hand crafts lie in front of you. What your hands are holding names the craft — there are no recipe ghosts and no crafting menu anywhere in the game. A bow is made from parts: a sapling cut to a stave, shaped, and seasoned by the fire.

Twenty-nine items, stone age only, and the list does not grow — new items replace old ones rather than piling up. Twelve building pieces: post, wattle wall, hide door, thatch roof, floor platform, ladder, hearth ring, storage rack, drying rack, farm plot, palisade stake and gate.

Sharpen stakes and hammer them in — stake in one hand, hammer in the other — to wall your camp. Raiders break it down again.

Twelve kins, six seats

Twelve kins exist and six meet in a valley, never the same one twice. Stonekin build faster and build stronger. Firekin hit harder and set what they hit alight. Stormkin move. Spiritkin breed. Oceankin heal. Voidkin leave no tracks and fade when they crouch. Ravenkin begin with a raven already theirs. Sunkin grow more food. Elderkin generate spirit and can channel technologies out of another tribe. Ashkin take more punishment. Beastkin hunt better. Dreamkin get stronger at the henge.

Your population caps at eighteen. There is no job screen: gatherer, woodcutter, hunter, farmer, builder, fire-keeper, guard, acolyte, falconer — all of it is decided by what you put in someone's hands.

You command by speaking

Look at someone and they turn their head and meet your eyes. Hold a key and talk, and your words go out as actual sound in the world: come, follow, stay, work here, take this, attack, fall back, guard here, keep watch, go scout. Hold the key to address everyone within earshot instead of one person.

Everyone hears — only your own obey. An enemy close enough to hear your orders learns them too, so quiet coordination costs you speed. Voice carries by how loudly you actually speak: a whisper reaches five metres, a shout reaches sixty, and a shout startles animals seventy-five metres out.

Your people answer in their own words, through a language model running on your own machine — the companion, wanderers, the shaman, and the other chiefs. A battle speech is weighed on its merits and heartens the people around you. Scouts come back and tell you what is out there in plain speech, because there is no map and no compass: wolves, three of them, forty paces off, behind you.

Charting the sky

Technology comes out of the sky. Stand still on a clear night, look up, roll the wheel, and the stars open into a branching tree of a hundred nodes across five elements. Hold to chart one and it costs you spirit. A roof or daylight refuses you.

At the henge the same sky shows two more nodes per branch that exist nowhere else, and everything costs forty percent less. Five Radiant Stars sit one inside each constellation — Heartfire, The Far Wind, The Great Silence and the rest — and each closes for good once enough tribes have taken it.

But the stargazer is flat on their back, in open ground, in the middle of the map, at night, and death is final. It is the most dangerous thing you will ever do on purpose. Bring guards.

Spirit comes from meditation, from standing practice, from the fumes of three contested caves, from psychedelics that leave you helpless for the duration — and fastest of all from a ninety-second seated rite with your head back, unable to watch the treeline.

The bonus technologies

There is a second tree, and it only exists at the stones.

Anywhere in the valley with open sky above you, the chart shows the ordinary tree. Stand inside the henge — within about forty metres of its centre, at night — and the same five constellations grow two further nodes on every branch, at depths three and four. Those nodes are invisible everywhere else in the world. You cannot plan them from your camp, you cannot see what you are missing, and the only way to learn they exist is to go and lie down in the middle of the map.

Everything inside the ring also costs forty percent less spirit, and spirit accrues about five times faster while you are in it, for the first few minutes of each night. The henge is not a bonus you collect; it is the only place deep technology happens, and all six tribes know it.

The Radiant Stars

Inside each constellation sits one Radiant Star, placed where the match seed puts it, each with a name of its own: Deep Roots in Earth, The Still Pool in Water, Heartfire in Fire, The Far Wind in Air, The Great Silence in Ether. They are charted at the henge and nowhere else.

Each one closes for good after a set number of tribes have taken it, and the card tells you how many places are left — two tribes may hold it · one of two places taken · at the henge. Heartfire and The Great Silence admit exactly one tribe each. First to the stones takes them; everyone else reads that they are gone.

A sixth, The Held Breath, slows everything within its reach.

What it costs you to be there

While the tree is open at the henge a column of pale light rises around you — the communion. It is beautiful, it is visible from a long way off, and it is announcing to five other tribes exactly where you are and that you are lying on your back and cannot see them coming.

Six tall torches stand on a ring around the stones, one per tribe, all six burning from the first night. A torch gutters out with a last gust of smoke when its tribe is eliminated, and it never relights. The standings are not on a screen; they are the ring of fires around the one place everybody has to keep coming back to.

The valley

Six starting caves ring the valley, and a whole underground runs beneath it — one cave system per section, joined by tunnels, two to four ways into each. Fine flint, healing fungus, crystal and rock salt come off the walls with a hammerstone, and nothing down there grows back. Three fume caves are placed at random and contested. Salt exists in one place on the map.

Something sleeps in a sealed rock crag until night: the Bone Ghost, our own dragon. In its chamber it bites, sweeps its tail, throws people down with a gust of its wings, and roars your guards wide open. It senses only those who come into its lair.

The ground, the rocks and the cliffs are photo scans of real stone. Clouds are painted from the weather. Crows feed in flocks, bears rear and roar as they turn, rabbits graze in herds, and every animal call is a real recording. Read a print to know what passed and how long ago, follow a blood trail, raise a wolf pup into a hunting companion. Firelight keeps the wolves off at night.

How a match ends

One sitting, three to five hours, played straight through — two or three in-game days, each running dawn to dawn. The first day is peace, walled in by fog you can walk up to and not through. From the third night a mist closes in from the valley's edge and tightens toward the henge after every nightfall, pushing bodies back ahead of it.

There is no fixed last day. Six tall torches stand in a ring around the henge, one per tribe; a torch goes out when its tribe is eliminated and never relights. When your chief dies, your tribe is out — people, buildings, stores and fire all gone from the valley at once. The match ends when one torch is still burning.

Send a raven carrying a tablet to call a parley, a truce or an alliance. The bird is visible in the sky and can be shot down, and whoever brings it down reads what it was carrying. At the meeting itself players speak as themselves — the one place in the game where that is true. Alliances are social, not mechanical: nothing is tracked, nothing is shared, and nothing punishes you for betrayal.

Rating is Elo, settled once per match, resolved pairwise against all five of the others.

The chiefs you did not bring

Every seat a human does not fill is an AI chief, playing by the same rules — same tree, same hunger, same fire, same movement-speed economy, no resource cheating. They raid any camp including yours, scout it with ravens first, move camp ahead of the mist and after a raid, bear children by their own fires and take in wanderers.

They come in flavours. The Raider keeps a small tribe, takes weapons first and economy last, steals food and douses hearths rather than fighting fair. The Grower builds the largest population, farms early and walls late, and wins outright if nobody stops it. The Ghost stays small and quiet, races the tree, camps the fume caves, avoids open fights and sabotages.

What this game will never have

Any camera that is not your own eyes. No top-down view, no RTS overlay, no build camera, no real-time map of any kind. No job assignment screen. No crafting menu, no recipe list, no quest marker, no checklist of objectives.

The game keeps no to-do list, but it does remember a tribe's firsts: the first fire fed, the first flake struck, the first bow, the first carcass cut up, the first meat roasted. The first woman walks into your camp on the smell of that first roast.