Cordon briefing

How to play

The first ten minutes

You arrive at a checkpoint in the wall, out in the street. Do these things in order and you will be fine:

• Move one block with the pad until you are standing on a building.
• Tap Go inside. You cannot search a building from the street.
• Tap Search a few times. Hospitals have kits, police stations have guns, malls have a bit of everything.
• Tap Barricade until it reads quite strongly barricaded, then stop. Over-build it and nobody can get in, including you.
• Spend whatever action points are left, then close the tab. They come back on their own.

Action points

Everything costs one action point: a step, a search, a swing, a plank on the barricade. You hold at most 60, and you get one back every 1 minutes and 30 seconds, awake or not. Moving as one of the dead costs two until you learn Lurching Gait. Leading civilians costs two a step, because they are slow.

This is deliberate. It means a session is short, that nobody can play more of the game than you by sitting at it all day, and that the city is made of a great many small decisions rather than a few long ones.

Inside and outside

A building block has a street and an interior, and you are in one or the other. The dead outside a barricaded building can only pull at the barricade. Everything that matters happens on one side of that line.

The living can climb in from the street while the barricade is no stronger than lightly barricaded. Above that the only way in is Free Running, a skill that moves you roof to roof from another building next door. That is why the strong places in the city are always reached from a building beside them.

Barricades

A barricade runs from nothing up to extremely heavily barricaded, and it gets harder to build the higher it goes. The dead cannot get through any barricade at all: they have to take it down to nothing first, and that takes many of them many hours. You cannot barricade a building that already has the dead inside it, and you cannot barricade a wrecked one until it is repaired with a toolbox.

Civilians

Civilians hide in buildings and never move. They are the whole count. Inside a building, Gather them takes up to three with you, more with Leadership and Evacuation Protocol. Walk them to any checkpoint in the wall and send them out. If you are killed while leading people, they scatter back into whatever block you died in.

Every civilian the dead reach becomes one of the dead. That is why a building nobody is holding gets worse on its own, and why the last week of a season is so much faster than the first.

Being killed

At zero health you fall where you are and become a body. Nothing is lost: your skills, your experience and your things are all still yours. Stand up, for ten action points or one with Ankle Grab, and you are one of the dead, playing the other half of the game.

Someone with Lab Experience and a syringe can bring you back. The living do this for strangers constantly, which is the strange, good heart of a game like this one.

Infection

A bite from one of the dead who has learned Infectious Bite leaves something behind. An infected survivor loses health with every single thing they do, until somebody uses a first aid kit on them. It is not a timer. It is a tax on being useful, and it will kill you in the middle of something.

Power

Buildings have no power. A portable generator and a can of fuel will light one for a few hours: searching goes better, surgery works in hospitals, radio towers transmit, and the worst cases of Brain Rot can be brought back in a laboratory. A running generator also makes noise, and noise is what the dead follow.

Noise

Everything you do makes some. A shotgun makes a great deal. A groan from one of the dead carries for blocks and pulls the wandering ones toward it. If a quiet corner of the city suddenly has company, somebody was loud.

Skills

Experience comes from doing things: hitting, healing, building, and above all getting civilians out. Each skill costs 100 and is yours permanently, across every season that follows. You can learn from either side's list whatever you currently are, and most players eventually do.

The radio

Carry a radio and tune it, and you hear everything broadcast on that frequency across the whole city. To transmit you need the Radio Operator skill, or a radio tower with the power on. Nothing about this is moderated or verified. People will tell you a mall is safe. Sometimes it is.

The season

A season runs for 21 days. It ends early if every soul is accounted for, or if every one of the dead is put down. Otherwise the cordon closes the wall and whoever is still inside is counted as lost. Then a new city is generated and everyone starts again in it, keeping their skills and their record.

What cannot happen to you

• You cannot be knocked out of a season. The dead are a side, not a defeat.
• You cannot lose your skills or your experience, ever.
• Nobody can buy anything. There is nothing to buy.