BUSY HOUR

Size every board and every wire for the busiest hour of the day.

BUSY HOUR is a free telephone-company incremental for your browser. It is 1895. You have one magneto switchboard in a market town, sixty subscribers and an operator on each shift. Each day you play is one year of the company, and by 1935 the whole county should be able to call itself.

How it plays

• Open exchanges in the county's eight towns, add sections to their boards, and string pole routes between them. Every county is generated: its towns, river, fields and woods.
• Calls follow the day. At night a lamp lights now and then; at ten in the morning every board is busy. On a manual board each call waits for an operator on the shift, and you set how many sit at the board on the day, evening and night shifts. A lamp nobody answers in two minutes is a caller who gave up.
• Toll calls between two towns grow with the subscribers at BOTH ends, and each one needs a free circuit on every leg of its route. When every circuit is busy the call is lost. The curve under the map shows the day's calls by the hour, with the lost ones in red.
• Sleet brings open wire down; linemen climb the poles and mend it. Lead cable is dearer and the weather cannot touch it.
• Ten inventions arrive by year: common battery boards, the multiple board, loading coils for longer routes, the toll board (calls may go via other towns), lead cable, phantom circuits, motor linemen, the automatic exchange in 1919, carrier current, and toll dialling in 1928.
• At the end of every day the books close: rent, toll calls, wages and upkeep. Each town's subscribers grow toward what the year will bear, as far as its board has lines and only while its service is good. A year that ends in debt reopens from the morning it opened, with everything built before it kept.
• Three endings after 1935. The best one is THE COUNTY DIALS: every town open, connected and automatic.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything: click a town to open its panel, click a wire to open the route. Space or P pauses, I opens the inventions, 1, 2 and 4 set the speed, M turns the sound off and on, Esc closes a panel. On a phone held upright the county turns to fill the screen and panels open on the side away from the town you picked; held sideways you see the whole county.

The company saves in your browser as you go, and CONTINUE picks up the same year and minute. A full campaign is about half an hour at normal speed.

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Paid, from the same studio

• GLASSWRIGHT ($9.99): run a medieval glassworks, where every window you complete is drawn by the game.
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Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. The code and the text were written with AI assistance. The county, its towns, its wires and every switchboard are drawn live by the game's own code; the cover illustration on this page was made with an image model. The music and every sound were made by the game's own synthesis code, with no generative audio model and no samples. Typefaces: Limelight and Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside them.