Design pillars

The design rests on seven pillars. They read like a slogan list until you see the problem each one answers. This page keeps the reasons next to the pillars so that a proposal which breaks one can be recognised as breaking it.

Frontier economy, pick a lane

The town starts from nothing and the players build its economy. Nobody is handed a job. They look at what the town is short of, choose a trade, and the first to fill a gap does best. Markets are released at milestones, so the town grows from what players actually do.

The reason is partly fun and partly economic. A game where every player does the same thing (cut trees, sell logs) has one price and no reason to talk to anyone. A game where trades depend on each other has shops that need customers and customers that need shops, and that is what turns a pile of individual claims into a town. The detail is in Pick a lane.

Realistic

Land works like land. Location, slope, species, skidding, hauling distance, soil fertility, recording and survey fees, and proving up all matter, and the places and species are real ones from North Idaho. Almost every mechanic added after the first prototype was added to give a real-world fact a consequence. Mills that bid by supply, saws that dull, and a sawmill whose placement changes what your neighbours pay to reach it each began as a sentence about how a logging operation actually behaves.

The tie-breaker is stated plainly: when realism and convenience disagree, realism wins, and facts get checked before they go in. That is harder than it sounds, because most of the historical background was written from memory and has not been checked. Setting and history keeps that account.

Fun first

The game is free and there is nothing to buy. Nothing in it converts to real money, and land and timber are never described as rising in value. People play because the work is enjoyable: reading the land, choosing a trade, watching a stand come back.

The other half of the pillar is a warning from land rushes in other games, where land was sold and then sat empty. Land only matters if people want to be there, so the game has to be worth playing before anything about the land is promised.

Sustainable economy

An emission on a timer, with too few sinks, makes the value of the thing depend on a stream of new buyers. If units appear whatever anyone does, the supply grows and the reasons to hold it do not. The answer in this game is that value comes from work and every unit of lumber has somewhere to go: hauling losses, mill fees, upkeep, seed and plowing. No one is promised a yield. The whole of Economy, sinks and one-way money is this pillar.

Play now, own later

New players can start working immediately: each crew-day comes back after 20 minutes of rest and a wagon trip takes a minute or two, so there is something to do right away. What waits is ownership in the sense that carries consequences, meaning the right to enter the shared valley. That requires the deed, which is earned by doing work on the claim.

The design decision is that a “come back tomorrow” clock is a weak way to keep players. They should be able to get going right away and hit a milestone before they own land in the shared valley. So the gate is effort, not elapsed time. See Proving up and the deed for why that went through three versions.

Fixed rules, player-driven scarcity

The studio publishes how fast trees grow and regrow and then does not touch the numbers to move a price. The project holds that scarcity is up to the players: if everyone develops land, timber becomes scarcer and more valuable, and that should come from play rather than from a dial.

Because the studio still sets the rules, the rules are meant to be locked once published, with later changes going through a vote or a published schedule. Scarcity and the Forest Reserve covers how that sits next to a forest the studio owns.

Local roots

The setting is Harrison, Idaho, in the Coeur d’Alene River country. It gives the game real species, real place names and a real arc from homesteading through timber, steamboats, recreation and development, with the Silver Valley as a possible later setting. It is also the reason the zoomable valley map exists. The caution is that “real” has to be earned: the setting page lists what has actually been checked, which is currently very little.