SCOURFAIR

Keep the white horse white, then cut your own.

SCOURFAIR is a free incremental about an old chalk hill figure, playable in your browser. A white horse is cut into the down above a vale, and every day the turf creeps back in. Travellers on the vale road pay tolls by how famous the figure is. You scour it by hand, hire scourers, cart in fresh chalk, lay kerbs, bring back the scouring fair, and at the end you cut a figure of your own on the second hill.

The rule at the heart of it

Each cell of the figure greys by the share of its eight sides that are turf, so the corners grey fastest. Fame comes from detail, and detail is edge. So the more intricate a figure, the more it draws the road and the more it costs to keep.

• Detail pays. A giant with arms and legs draws far more fame than a plain block of the same size.
• Edges cost. In a wet spring that giant greys more than twice as fast as the block.
• Kerbs answer the corners. Timber kerbs stop the creep for good, and on the corners they save more than twice what they save on a straight edge. Each one costs a little more than the last, so you choose where they go.
• The fair crowd follows fame. Every fourth summer the vale comes up the hill to scour for nothing, and the crowd is as big as the figures are famous on the day it opens.
• The vale judges what it finds. The great scouring is judged when the fair OPENS, not after the crowd has done the work: both figures must already be white.

What you do

Click or tap a grey cell to scour it, or drag your spade along an edge. Hired scourers walk the figure on a round, three cells each a day. Fourteen upgrades open as the hill earns: better spades, the chalk pit and its carts, the scouring fair, kerbs, a viewing point on the road, the antiquarians who find the horse's lost lines, an excursion train on fair days, and THE SECOND HILL, where you draw your own figure with a brush, undo and three starting figures (a giant, a stag and a crane in flight). Last of all, the kerb gang edges the most exposed cell for you each season. Once your own figure has stood through a fair you can proclaim the great scouring for the next summer instead of waiting for the fourth.

From the road you can see both downs at once: the view is drawn from the same cells you scour, so the hill you keep is the hill the travellers see.

There is no game over. A figure gone green can always be scoured back, the old village scourer works on when the hill cannot pay its hands, and the hill keeps going while you are away for up to a season, settled as arithmetic. Play goes on after the great scouring.

Controls: mouse or touch for everything, or the keyboard alone (arrow keys and Enter over the hill, number keys for the panel's buttons, T next tab, V switch hill, W quick scour, F 3x, P pause, H help, M sound). It has its own tall layout for a phone held upright.

Paid, from the same studio

• MILLWRIGHT ($5.99): raise three windmills in a farming parish so every farm's cart has the shortest road.
• GLASSWRIGHT ($9.99): run a medieval glassworks, where every window you complete is drawn by the game.
• THE TURNING YEAR ($9.99): one world drawn four times over; turn the season and hold it while the year pulls back.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code and text were written with AI assistance. Every picture in the game is drawn by code written for it, over ground plates from our own procedural pixel engine; the cover illustration was made with an image model. The music ("The Vale Road") and the sound effects are synthesised by code, with no generative audio model. The vale and its people are invented; the old custom of scouring a hill figure at a fair is real.

More free browser games: SHELLYARD, HEFTSTONE, THEODOLITE. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.