SWELTER

Ice melts by its exposed faces. A block with ice on all four sides keeps almost all of itself. A block standing alone in the yard is gone in days.

So the stack protects itself, and every block you cart away punches a hole in the thing that was keeping the others alive. Where you take it from is a real decision with a real number behind it.

You run an icehouse in a hot colonial port. Ships bring ice down from the north; you buy it, pack it into a straw-lined pit, and sell it to a town that wants it most on exactly the days it dies fastest.

The year is the engine

• THE COOL: a ship lands every single day and ice is cheap. Fill the pit.
• THE RAINS: ships every other day, and the heat climbing.
• THE HEAT: ships four days apart and dear, and the town will pay almost anything.
• THE FEVER: hot, and the heat does not let go.

Heat drives the price and the melt, off the same number. That is the whole gamble: hold, and watch it go; sell, and open a hole in your own insulation.

Fourteen improvements, each one moving a term of the arithmetic

Sawdust under the floor. Straw in the gaps. A thatch roof over the yard. A cavity wall, then cork against the brick. A deeper pit, a wider yard. A felt-lined cart that loses less on the road, a round in the high town that pays more, a second round the town can absorb. A thermometer, then an almanac. A saw to halve a block where it lies. And eventually a plant that makes its own, ship or no ship.

Each one names the exact number it changes, so you always know what you bought.

Three years

Forty-eight days across four seasons, then a graded account of what the whole thing came to, down to how many pounds ran out through the floor.

• Free, and it plays in this page.
• Mouse, touch or keyboard. Works on a phone, upright or sideways.
• It saves itself every day and whenever you leave the tab. Close it and come back.
• A speed control, for when you want to watch a season go by.

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code, graphics and text were produced with AI assistance; the in-game art is generated procedurally by code written for this game rather than by an image model, and the sound and music are synthesised procedurally from code rather than by an audio model. No third-party assets, fonts or audio are included.

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Paid, from the same studio

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