Playing Verdigris

You are Verdigris's alderman. You never place a building.

Named residents bring real conditions to your desk: a failing house, aggrieved hands, a public door needed before the rain, sickness behind doors, a disputed public account. You inspect the people and the place, follow them through the day, and spend a small number of measures of influence.

The ledger judges what the city actually did, not which button you pressed.

The short version#

• Read the matter. Find out who is bringing it and why.
• Look at the place and the people before you answer.
• Spend a measure only when you know what it will actually change.
• Every seventh dawn, the ratepayers vote on your record. That vote sets how many measures you get for the following week.

Your day#

Measures of influence are the scarce thing. You get 2, 3 or 4 a day depending on how the last ratepayers' sitting went. Everything else is free: looking, walking, reading, following somebody.

Time runs forward only. The control says "advance to" and means it. There is no rewind, so an unwatched afternoon is genuinely gone.

One tick is one game minute. Souls are on schedules, so the district has people in it whenever you look, and not only at the two rushes.

The Alderman's Desk#

A bounded daily agenda derived from live city state. Each matter carries:

• A named petitioner, who is a real resident with a real address.
• An inspectable place.
• Visible causes: the chain of events that produced the condition.
• A deadline.
• A delayed verdict.

Matters are not quests. Their cause, deadline and verdict are all read out of the simulation, which means an answer that does not change the underlying condition will be recorded as a failure however good it sounded at the desk.

Verdicts are judged on outcomes#

This is the part that catches people out. Filing the right paperwork is not the same as fixing the thing:

Pending promises can be pressed at further political cost. Work you filed before a petition arrived still receives its proper credit, so acting early on something you noticed yourself is rewarded.

Forecasts#

Each available move is marked public or deniable, and settled, contested or unclear. These forecasts come from the same deterministic predicates the sim uses, so they are not flavour: an "unclear" really is a state the simulation cannot currently resolve.

Selecting a petition marks the relevant measures but never chooses one for you.

The Works Register#

File a fabric, drain or gas case against a specific building.

A works case is a request, not a repair. It travels through the pneumatic post, so post access changes how long it takes to arrive. It then waits for an actual workshop, and finally succeeds or fails against the district's coin and its rot. The three outcomes are repaired, cosmetically skimmed, or shelved.

You can read case state off the building itself: survey marks, scaffold, blue sheeting, completion plaques, gutters, broken pipes, damp and puddles are all evidence of simulation state rather than decoration.

Street politics#

Nothing here teleports. Every political effect requires a body to make a journey.

• Petitioners walk to Civic Hall. This does not delay an actionable case.
• A kept promise sends a named patron to speak at the newspaper.
• A broken or declined promise sends a named opponent to a public house.
• The ward's support or opposition changes only once that person arrives.

You can watch this happen, and you can intervene while it is in transit.

The ratepayers' sitting#

Every seventh day, at a fixed 8AM vote in the square:

• A named supporter and a named opponent test your standing and any exposed clandestine record.
• Up to eight named adults travel to the square. Only those who actually reach it count.

No result ends the game. The next sitting can reverse it.

Because attendance is a physical journey, weather and public order on the morning of the vote are part of the vote.

What the district does on its own#

You are not the only thing happening.

• Eight pressures move on their own, against baselines that are functions of world state.
• Six incidents fire from pressure thresholds, each carrying the cause chain that produced it. Ask why, and the game can tell you.
• Disasters are physical and stateful: a damaged building, a broken main, a cleanup clock.
• Claims spread along the relationship graph and distort as they travel. A rumour keeps a lineage you can walk back to whoever started it.
• Weather runs in seeded six hour watches, and gates fires and floods.
• Civic Market Day is a real occasion with real vendors who have to arrive before the goods do.

The thing the game is actually about#

Civic pride papering over rot.

rot decides whether a repair that was ordered actually happened. The courts behind the gold leaf frontages are a spatial fact the generator produces, not flavour text.

Undisturbed, the district settles at an average facade of 610 against an average fabric of 520. Spend fourteen days funding the bunting and facade rises to 669 while fabric falls to 462.

The city looks better and is structurally worse. That is the whole game, and nothing in the interface will stop you doing it.

Controls#

?seed=coppergate in the URL generates a different district. ?ui=3 scales the panels up.

Every verb has a keyboard equivalent. On a phone, the single surface shell keeps persistent LOOK, ACT, DESK, VESTRY and HELP routes, with stepped pinch zoom and coarse pointer person picking.