POLDER

Every water game on the shelf treats water as a number you pile up. Here the water is the ground you are standing on.

You are granted a salt fen, an eight year lease and no sea bank at all. Every cell of the fen holds a real depth of water that flows toward the lowest ground beside it, every tick, so a mill drains its own neighbourhood and the map dries in the shape you caused. The progress bar IS the map.

Shut the sea out first. Then cut the ditches, raise the mills, get the salt out of the ground and put a crop in it before the season closes.

What you are actually managing

• Water as terrain. A simulated field that relaxes toward the lowest head every tick, against a sea boundary that moves with the tide. Where you cut the ditches is the whole game; a mill with no ditches feeding it sits there pumping a puddle.
• Salt. It only leaves a field while fresh water is moving through it, so ground pumped bone dry keeps what it has. Drying too hard is a mistake you can make.
• Peat that sinks. Dry ground subsides. The land you won gets harder to keep.
• A mill holds a level, not a switch — and one mill sets the water table of everything around it.
• Three upgrade tracks that gate each other: LIFT (how much water you move, and whether the wind gets a vote), DEFENCE (how much sea you keep out), LAND (what a reclaimed field is worth).

The survey

The lease runs eight years. Storms come mostly in the last three days of each year, and on the last day of the lease the great storm comes. When it has passed the commissioners survey one bounded parcel of the fen: two parts in five of it dry and sweet, and the polder is yours.

A breach does not end your run

It costs you the span of bank that failed and the ground behind it, and the cells you had leached go sour again. Everything else stays exactly where it was. The game saves itself from the moment you begin and after every day — close the tab and come back whenever. There is no full restart in here.

Playing it

Pick a tool, then click a cell. On a touchscreen, tap the tool, then tap a cell to read it and tap again to work it, so you can look at the ground without buying on it. If a cell will not take what you are holding, the game says why rather than charging you. Works in portrait or landscape on a phone.

Keys: Space runs the day or pauses it · 1 to 7 tools · P or Esc pause · M sound.

Free, and made by us

Free to play in the browser, nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. Code, graphics and text are AI generated. The sound is not: every effect and the music loop are synthesised from oscillators and noise by code we wrote. The game is set in EB Garamond, which ships inside the build under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1. Nothing else here was sampled, scraped or borrowed.

If you enjoy it, following the studio is the single most useful thing you can do. This track is free precisely so it can find an audience.

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