ANAGAMA

An anagama is a kiln that is a tunnel up a hillside. You light a fire at the bottom and for the next several days the flame climbs, and everything it touches on the way is changed by it. What comes out at the other end is not what you put in.

This is an incremental about running one. The numbers buy clay and wood. What you get back is not a bigger number — it is a shelf of pots that will never exist again.

The fire finishes what you start

Throw greenware from clay. Clay is the cheap part; what a pot really costs you is a place in the kiln.

Pack it into the chambers. Chamber one sits against the firebox: hottest, ashiest, most dangerous. Each chamber up the slope is cooler, cleaner and calmer. Inside a chamber, the front slot faces the flame and the back one hides from it.

Light it, and you stop building. From that moment you have three controls and no undo:

• Stoke — too little and the clay never matures. Too much, held too long, and the load slumps.
• Damper — close it and you starve the fire of air. That is reduction, and it pulls the iron in the ash glaze to green; open it and the same glaze goes amber. Closing it also costs you heat, so you must stoke harder to hold a reduction — and reducing a cold kiln does nothing at all.
• Wood — pine burns hot and drops the most ash. Oak is steady and clean.

Heat and ash travel up the slope with a delay, so what you do at the firebox reaches the top chamber a minute later. You are always firing the past.

Every pot is a one-off, and that is not a figure of speech

There is no pot image anywhere in this game. Every vessel you see is drawn from the firing that made it — its form, its glaze, the chamber it stood in, which way it faced the flame, and the whole temperature and atmosphere history that actually passed over it.

Two identical bowls packed a metre apart come out different. Permanently. The shelf keeps them.

Collectors want surfaces rather than pots — a green ash celadon tea bowl, heavily ashed — so what is worth firing decides what is worth packing, and where.

Some things worth knowing

• A ruined firing costs the load. It never costs the shelf. Nothing you have already drawn from the kiln can be taken away from you.
• Extending the kiln makes the chambers you already have hotter. A longer kiln draws harder. It is not a plus-ten-percent button.
• Salt cannot be aimed. Throw it in and the whole kiln wears it.
• You learn a glaze recipe by accidentally firing it.
• Ten vessel forms, five surface families, a kiln you can extend to six chambers, and a kiln book that records every surface you have found.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything. During a firing the arrow keys work too — up and down for the stoke, left and right for the damper.

Free, plays in the browser, and it saves itself.

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Every asset here is generated by the game — the kiln's materials, the music, and every pot. There is no third-party art or audio in it.

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