BANNWALD

Above the village the slope fills with snow all winter. Under it runs the pass road, and every day it is open the travellers pay the toll and stop at the inn. That is all the money there is.

When the slope lets go, the snow runs down. Most slides stop on the slope; on a bare slope in a hard winter, many reach the road and shut it, and a big one reaches a house.

Build snow fences and rakes to hold the slope this winter. Bring a loaded cell down on purpose with a controlled release. And plant the forest: saplings cost almost nothing, hold nothing their first winter, and once grown they hold the slope and catch the snow that runs into them. A Bannwald is exactly that, the protection forest above an alpine village.

What is in it

• A slope that settles like a sandpile: 20 by 10 cells, and one cell letting go can set off the cells below it, so most slides are small and a few run a long way.
• A slope that shows its load as snow: drifts swell as a cell fills and a dark crack opens where the next slide is about to break, so you can see it coming.
• Weather on a clock: flurries, storms and blizzards from the west or the east, and a weather post that lets you read them ahead.
• Nine rungs on the ladder: fences, a nursery, timber rakes, a gallery roof over the road, the weather post, steel rakes, a forester, a guides' hut and the second slope.
• An ending: the mountain at dawn with the forest you grew, and every winter's slides laid under it as a runout map.
• No game over: a bad winter costs money and young trees, never the village, and the winters go on after the ending.
• Composed music and synthesised sound, saves as you play, and plays on a phone held either way.

Plays in the browser with mouse, touch or keyboard. A winter takes about a minute and a half at normal speed, and you can run it faster. The defences are real ones; the snow is simplified for play. Nothing here is advice about real avalanche terrain.

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Paid, from the same studio

• NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99): before dawn, clear every street of a snowed in village with one plough and end back at the depot.
• THE TURNING YEAR ($9.99): one dial turns the season across the whole world; freeze a brook into a road, or melt a fell to float a boat.
• ROOTWORK ($5.99): grow one seed's roots down through a generated meadow to reach every pocket of water, never upward.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. The code, the art and the text were written with AI assistance. The slope, the trees, the village and every defence in the game are drawn by its own code, and the three ground textures come from the studio's own pixel generator; the cover illustration on this page and the painting behind the title screen were made with an image model. The music and every sound are synthesised by the game's own code, with no generative audio model and no samples. Body type: Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside it.

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