A whole world,one decisionat a time.

Behind every screen a band of thirty-odd people is living, pairing up, falling sick and moving away. The run hub doesn’t try to show that. It shows you, this year, and one thing to do next. Tap the pins.

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1. 1Who you are
2. 2How you're doing
3. 3The band, at a glance
4. 4What's coming
5. 5This year's moment
6. 6One thing to do next

Who you are. Your name, face and age, first. Everything else on the screen is about this one person.

Places, people and the current moment each get their own view, so detail appears where the question is.

The season board is the game’s hardest screen: threats and bounties in lanes, a hand of people, numbers everywhere. Two decisions make it readable. Each front’s badge says whether it holds before you commit, and every result shows its sum. Play a round.

The deepest screen was also the first one a newcomer met. The birth-year board ran about eight rounds, Auto-play was grayed out all year, and a round could dead-end on “Fill 1 more column” with an empty hand.

1. Shelter the first life.Two thirds of first lives were ending before age 5. Until you’ve lived to 5 once, the board never seats your own baby, and a death on a lane becomes a wound you pull through.
2. Never dead-end.A stuck board now settles itself, and says who moved.
3. Put the escape on the main button.Nobody tapped Auto-play in its corner before round 8. In a first life the main button now reads “Auto-play this round”.
4. Make the first year short.Two rounds, then the band finishes the season on its own.

The bone circle is a ring of mammoth bone the band can raise on clear ground near camp. Its first picker made the wrong cells ignore your tap, and they looked almost the same as the right ones. A tap with no visible response reads as broken, not as “not allowed”. Try both versions.

Life cards are mostly prose, so each choice carries an icon that says what it does: a hand-picked one, else the injury or illness it risks, else the path it starts you on, else its strongest stat change. This is the real rule, on a real card.

The first goal on the Mammoth Steppe is to tame the wolf at the edge of camp. Underneath, it’s a bond that climbs from 20 to 70. On screen there is no number at all: a few words for where things stand, and one quiet line a season about what the wolf did.

The icons were drawn or generated against a written style guide, then traced, reviewed and redrawn when one read as an abstract shape. Cohesion was a direction job, not a drawing job. Filter the set.

• Plain beats prettyModern, casual, how a person talks. Not a narrator.
• Teaching states the ruleIf a sentence explains a mechanic, it drops the mood and says the rule.
• Flavor keeps its voiceA line about the world can still sound like the world.
• No em dashesThey read as machine-written. Every string in the game avoids them.

• “The thaw’s here at last. The hungry season is broken.”
• “Dahak is simply herself today: present, capable, unhurried.”
• “The ice age still grips the world, and the wolf is a rival at the kill.”
• “Then winter takes you too. It takes everyone.”

One hand-built particle system, no confetti library, seven presets. A victory gets 72 falling motes; a child named at the fire gets 22 rising ones. Pick a moment.

Each of the 366 days has its own light and dark palette. The calendar themes color the world (headers, cards, gradients) while the controls keep their places, so a new color every day never means relearning the screen.

The audience is small, so this page is design reasoning and what a small group showed me, not a growth chart. The questions I’d want answered next:

• Do newcomers get through their first spring now that it’s two rounds?
• Which symbols read without their labels, and which only work once you know them?
• Does showing the sum on a loss make people try again, or stop?
• How many people start a second life after their first one ends?