PYX

You run the realm's mint for a forty-year reign. You set the weight and the fineness of every penny you strike, and every grain you hold back is profit.

The realm notices.

What is in it

• Debasement against trust. A lighter, baser penny makes more coins from every ounce of silver. Then it spreads over a map of market towns, and where light coin circulates, trust drains out of the map. Prices rise, good coin is hoarded and slips abroad from the ports (Gresham's law, drawn as chests and silver sailing off), and merchants start weighing your pennies and refusing them. Trust is what brings silver to the mint.
• Clippers at the frontier. Plain-edged coin is shaved at the edges of the realm until a milled-edge press stops them.
• The Trial of the Pyx. Every five years the box of sample coins is opened and every issue is assayed against the standard. Failures cost fines and standing.
• A workshop of nine works: a second press, die engravers, assayers, the milled edge, the great recoinage (call in every coin in the realm and strike it anew, at a price), a bullion contract, a provincial mint, the exchange, and the gold noble.
• A coin cabinet. Every issue is a coin the game draws: the king's portrait ageing through his reign, the legend lettered around the rim, the reverse, the mint mark, the metal running from bright sterling to coppery billon as you debase, and the wear and clipping the realm gave it. Forty or more coins a reign, one tray each.
• Four endings and no game over: the reign always runs its forty years. Time away is caught up, within a cap, when you come back.

A reign takes about 16 minutes at normal speed, and you can run the years faster. Plays in the browser on desktop or phone (it lays itself out upright on a phone), with mouse, touch or keyboard. It saves itself in your browser and never sends anything anywhere.

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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.
• NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99): before dawn, clear every street of a snowed in village with one plough and end back at the depot.
• 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. Every coin, town and map in the game is drawn by its own code, and the three ground textures come from the studio's own pixel generator; the cover illustration on this page was made with an image model. Every sound effect is synthesised in your browser by the game's own code, and the music loop is a file that the same code rendered, with no generative audio model and no samples. Typefaces: Cinzel and Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside them.

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