A family of small games about deciding under pressure — and an argument that pressure is a tax on deliberation. Every game here picks a different tax and charges it.
It started with the lurid phone-game ads: a machine gun, a horde, and a doorway with two numbers over it. The interesting thing about those ads is that they don't sell shooting. They sell choosing — and the shipped games behind them usually don't deliver it. So: build the ad. Then keep changing what makes the choice hurt, and see how far the nerve survives.
Deliberation is free in the abstract. A game becomes a game about decisions the moment thinking starts costing you something. Tap a tax to see which of these use it.
Built from opposite ends of the space. Every number below came out of that game's own analysis tool, not out of a feeling.
You are surrounded from six directions and your gun overheats, so you cannot just stare at the worst one. Clear a wave and you get six seconds to pick an upgrade. Freeze, and it picks the worst one for you.
The heat is the whole design. Without it, "allocate your fire" collapses into "point at the worst arc" and there is no decision in the game at all.
Every enemy shows you the exact tile it will hit. No clock, no dice, nothing hidden — and you still cannot stop it all. You rarely kill anything; you shove bodies so their attacks land somewhere you can afford.
Perfect information is not a concession here, it is the point: with nothing hidden and nothing random, a turn can be searched exhaustively.
A road you cross once, with tools you can spend once. No clock, no opponent, nothing hidden. Every choice just permanently removes an option, and there are never enough tools for every stage.
The run is deliberately silent. The solver knows the instant you go wrong and says nothing — the distance between the mistake and the news is the design.
Six lines, one operator. Hold a line to work it — and while you are holding it, you are holding it. Every other line keeps counting down without you. The whole shift is visible before the clock starts.
Telegraph took the clock away from perfect information. This puts it back and takes away everything else — so you are never guessing at the future, only failing to keep up with one you can see.
The Ratchet again, rebuilt around a body — the Europan ice war of the twenty-fourth century. Same mechanic, same solver, but the tools are now a crew, and spending one is a person going outside into Jupiter's radiation belt. Two trips is all anyone has in them.
This one is here because The Ratchet was right and unreadable. A road shown as rows of numbers reads as a spreadsheet however it is styled. The fix was not to hide information — Oregon Trail's map is visible too — it was to make the resource a person, the events prose, and the run something you can scroll back through. The setting earns its keep: the radiation belt is why spending someone costs. And the presentation had to stop being a list — the route is a horizon that recedes and fogs, and you spend people by dragging them onto the ice.
A web of lanes, things climbing them toward the rim you stand on, and a gun that only fires down your own lane. On a ring there are two ways round to anything — and on these webs the two ways cost different amounts, because the polygon you can see is literally the travel-cost table.
The arcade original drew its webs by hand and every lane was about as wide as every other, so the shape was scenery. Here it is the difficulty, and the generator refuses to ship a web that does not earn it. Three shape families were caught drawing convincingly and costing exactly like a circle before that check existed — a symmetric zigzag most memorably, because the player stands at edge midpoints, and the midpoints of a symmetric zigzag are evenly spaced along a straight line however jagged the outline looks.
The first instinct is to generalize by theme, or by how the pressure feels. That gets you reskins. The axis that produced two genuinely different games was narrower and stranger:
Each game should make a different thing measurable about your decision. Not "was it fun" — what, precisely, can be computed about the choice you just made?
Tempest is the clearest case of that rule doing work, because it caught its own first draft. That draft measured a binary: does exactly one way round the web survive? Genuinely a new shape — and a bad question, because on a web 66 ticks across a wave with 80 ticks of slack survives both ways whatever you do to it. The generator ground through 167 repairs to place four waves. Making the same question quantitative — what does the wrong way cost, in ticks — converged at once and reads better besides. The shape of the answer was right; the type of it was wrong.
Hold the Line can only ever say "a better player would have got further". Telegraph can say "4 of 812". That gap is not a difference of polish, it is a difference in kind — and once you notice it, the space opens up. Correctness can be a set, a timing, a survival condition, or a probability distribution.
| Game | Tax | Information | Cadence | "Correct" means |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hold the Line | a clock | partial, moving | continuous + a gate per wave | better or worse — no ground truth |
| Telegraph | scarcity | complete, still | one decision per turn | a countable set of clean lines |
| The Ratchet | irreversibility | complete, whole route | one commitment per stage | whether a future still exists |
| Switchboard | divided attention | complete, moving | continuous, one at a time | a price in points |
| Outbound | irreversibility, embodied | complete, whole run | one commitment per system | whether a future still exists |
| Cold Read | the cost of knowing | partial, purchasable | one commitment, whenever you like | when to stop, not what to pick |
| Standoff | another mind | hidden, simultaneous | blind commit per round | a distribution, not a move |
Not sketches for their own sake — each one exists because it makes something measurable that no shipped game here can measure. (The Ratchet was the third; it is built, and it is upstairs.) Full briefs in the README.
Contacts are inbound and you must call each one — friend or hostile — before you are sure. Every probe that sharpens your read costs: a second, a resource, a risk of being seen. Guess early and cheap, or pay until you are certain and be too late for the next one.
The decision is not what to call. It is when to stop looking — which is the deliberation tax attacked head-on rather than dressed up.
Both sides commit blind, then reveal. A small verb set with a rock-paper-scissors heart, plus resources that make some verbs affordable and others desperate. The opponent is an exploiter: it models your tendencies and punishes them.
The only game here where a single move cannot be right or wrong. What can be wrong is your habit.
One more, kept out of the three because it is less a game than an experiment: a game where you write a policy up front and then watch it run without you. All deliberation moves before the first frame; none is possible during. If pressure is a tax on deliberation, this is the version that pays the tax in advance and finds out whether it bought anything. Correctness there is measurable as the gap between your policy and the best policy in the same language — which is a strange and appealing thing to be scored on.