GALE WARNING

Your office never sees the weather. It sees what the telegraph wires in.

GALE WARNING is a free forecasting game for your browser. It is 1861, and you run the first storm-warning office on a western coast. Lows cross the sea from the west, the fishing fleets of eleven ports sail at five every morning, and before they go you decide, district by district, whether to hoist the cone that keeps them home.

How it plays

• The stations wire their readings at 20:00, and you decide overnight, before the fleets sail at five. The chart is drawn from those readings and nothing else: cream isobars, a wind arrow at every station that reported a wind, a red hatch where your own chart shows a gale. A low your network cannot see is simply not on it.
• Hoist a cone over a district and its fleets stay home. A fleet caught at sea by a gale loses boats and the ports lose trust in the office. A cone on a calm day costs the catch and a little trust. A gale that finds the fleets safe at home earns it.
• Build telegraph stations on the coast and the islands. Each line runs along the shore to the office; an island needs submarine cable, and a gale can bring a line down for a day.
• Each season opens new kit in the office: aneroid barometers, an afternoon and a dawn report, ship reports from out at sea, recall guns that bring a fleet home after dawn, kites that show where a low is heading, and hourly wires.
• After every gale day the chart shows in red what really blew, so you can see exactly what your network missed.
• Six seasons, 1861 to 1886, each a little stormier than the last. The Board pays a grant on the ports' trust at the end of each twenty day season. A season that closes under the Board's line runs again from its first day, with every station kept and the line a little lower each try. There is no game over.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything. On a keyboard: 5, 6, 7 and 8 hoist or lower the four cones, B builds, O opens the office, W shows the last wire, Space or P pauses, 1, 2 and 4 set the speed, M turns the sound off and on, and Escape closes a sheet or leaves build mode. On a phone the chart fills the screen held upright or sideways, and the WIRE button lists the last readings.

The office saves in your browser as you play. CONTINUE on the title picks up the same season, day and hour.

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Paid, from the same studio

• NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99): before dawn, clear every street of a snowbound village with one plough and end back at the depot.
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Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. The code and the text were written with AI assistance. The coast, the weather and the chart are drawn live by the game's own code from its own simulation, and the five ground materials were made by our own pixel generator, itself AI-written 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: Courier Prime and Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside them.