Mars, colonized — and a colony that must choose who gets to found it will discover that the choosing is the catastrophe, not the scarcity that forced it.
Est. 1879 · an informal map, drawn in dirt with a stick
Books that ship with terrain.
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.
One sky. Open the chart
The shelf — 3 universes, 6 books
Three books on one chart, and a sustained argument about how war in space would actually work — wormholes you cannot see inside, artillery slung from light-years away, and a nebula where every rule reverses.
Alien worlds and genetics, charted by an expedition that does not yet know what the survey costs. Every world you can survive on is a world you are already changing.
The games — 4 playable now
Each teaches the one mechanism its book is actually about. Under five minutes to your first failure, and the failure is the lesson.
- Trials The Deep In a closed ecosystem the light is alive. Darkness is not the absence of a lamp — it is the absence of something living, so every dark stretch is a place the system already failed. The thing that failed it breathes what the plants do not. Play it →
- Fractal Space Counter-Beacon You cannot deny the enemy a shortcut without denying it to yourself. The beacons that stop a fleet jumping past your defenses stop your own traffic too, so every layer of defense is paid for in the trade it strangles. Play it →
- Rogue Fleet The Soup Concealment and speed are the same resource spent in opposite directions: the medium that hides you is the medium that slows you, and the thrust that gets you out announces exactly where you were. Play it →
- Ashfall The Iron Rule A world can be lush and still be a desert to you. Calories are not a property of a place — they are a property of the match between a place and the body that arrived, and the only thing you can eat is the thing you brought. Play it →
Why a map you can walk into
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.