serverBound

Corporate AI broke the old internet. Nobody was surprised.

So people built a new one by hand: the World Wide Wonder, a patchwork of tiny self-hosted islands with guestbooks, zines, visitor counters and at least one grandmother's blog. It's drawn in grey paper and ink. Anything red is a problem.

You are a lurker. It's a real rank, and yes, it's the bottom one. When something starts eating somebody's server, the job gets posted in the town forum, and you're the one who takes it.

The crime scene is a website

• Walk the island. Read its records, listen in on its cables, and poke at whatever's been left lying around.

• Ask the locals. Some of them saw something. Some of them are wrong about what they saw. Welcome to detective work.

• Read their homepages. A zine with a visitor counter. A blog with spam bots in the comments. On this internet, the comments section is evidence.

• Fill in the case report. Every clue drops words into a report with blanks. A sentence only locks when its words are right and come from two different kinds of clue. One witness is gossip. Two is a case.

• Solve the little puzzles on the board. Which building is which, what happened first, and where it goes next.

Then plug in and prove it

Went in without reading:

Read the island first:

Same island, same fight. The second time, your cyberDeck knows which shop is making the bots.

Plug in at one of the island's few open doors. The duel is turn-based. You move along the cables, fence buildings off and clean them out. Then the threat takes its turn. Nobody rolls anything.

• Every threat has a rule. Ransomware always takes the shortest way to the archive, and it's booby-trapped. A phisher hooks the nearest house. A cryptominer grows out of the one building you'd never suspect. An ad server keeps making bots, because of course it does.

• What you know is what you see. Go in cold and every road the threat could take flickers at you. Go in having read the island and your cyberDeck shows you its next move, and warns you before you step on its trap.

• No levels. No hit points. No dice. You don't get stronger. You just get less wrong.

You may learn real security by accident

Every threat here works the way the real one does. The game explains it the way you'd explain it to a friend, then quietly puts the real command next to it, for the curious:

[code]› fence the centre relay $ iptables -I INPUT -j DROP[/code]

There's no test at the end. The ransomware is the test.

It's a cyberDeck. It is not a deck of cards.

There are no cards. The cyberDeck is the colourful machine you carry through the grey: the case board, the chats, the windows, the real commands.

Each web island's people talk in the Accord: servers, channels, DMs, and a moderator who is always away.

Demo coming soon

You sign in. Nobody answers. A Hydra made of pop-up ads turns up, and a local tells you not to worry: "Oh, that's just the local Hydra. They like Spam."

Then an anarchist grandmother needs help with her blog, and it's four cases on four islands from there: a market town drowning in ads, a meadow of red poppies, a stilt village where the post house never asks for your password, and a pine forest where the sawmill runs all night and cuts nothing.

Someone approved your sign-in. Nobody will say who.

For fans of Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, Hypnospace Outlaw and Into the Breach.