Deploy your limited options as a system operator. Bring users to your servers, but keep hackers out.

Game Rules

Ouch! It's clear from comments that I wiffed on making this game self-discoverable.

Here are the rules:

The hackers and users will move down the grid. Your goal is to clear the path for users to get all the way down to the servers, where they can score:

Hackers will make this hard by infecting your servers, and firewalls are how you eliminate hackers.

Place firewalls into horizontal connected runs:

Any hackers moving into them will get stuck inside. Then you can spend a turn clicking on the firewall to purge it, along with any hackers inside.

But watch out! If the hackers ever fill all available slots, that firewall will be breached, destroying it and releasing all the hackers inside.

Here a hacker is about to move down into a firewall, and it will take the last available slot, breaching it. If that happens the firewall will be destroyed and all three hackers will go free. So the player had better either place one more slot to grow this firewall, or else purge it right now to kill the two hackers already inside.

In this setup, the player is already screwed. A hacker threatens each of the two firewalls, and only one can be saved. Vertical connections do not matter - it's "defense in depth" not "defense in a giant blob."

When hackers inevitably infect your servers, your last resort is to click the server to kick them -- but this is not very efficient because 50% of the time they'll just respawn at the top of that column.

But here the player could at least earn an extra dollar by kicking that hacker in the second column, clearing a path for that users to score.

Best of luck.

Dev Notes

Kicking myself that I had to write rules in the description, the worst way to teach the game. Sorry!

After well over 20 LDs, all with Unity, I chose to use a totally different tech stack this time: boardgame.io with a React UI on top. It was a very disruptive decision, and I'm lucky the damage wasn't far worse.

Saturday was rough, and I woke up Sunday with an awful piece of trash, so I'm feeling pretty good about where it ended up.

Disclosure that I used Cursor, the AI coding assistant. It was kind of fun! Its results are all over the map in terms of usability. No way would I say that it was the primary author of the code, but this sort of cyborg experience was interesting. It's like having an assistant, but he is very junior, binge watches hustle influencers, and has a cocaine problem. Settle down, dude!