How this works
You are not a person. You are a presence — dropping into one ordinary life at a time, in rooms where the century is quietly being decided. A café waiter. A factory hand. A clerk who overhears everything. You don't survive from one moment to the next; what carries forward is the trail of consequences you leave behind.
What you're doing here
There's no score and no way to win or lose. You're here to shape the world and watch what happens — to lean on the people who happen to be in the room and see how the century bends. Where it bends is up to you. Living with it is the game.
The loop
- 01
Arrive. You drop into a scene — a place, a year, a handful of people who matter more than they know.
- 02
Talk. Speak freely with anyone present. Listen for what they want, fear, and might be talked into.
- 03
Push. When you've found a real opening, spend one of your few interventions to press it.
- 04
It resolves. The moment doesn't play out the way you decreed — it settles into one of several plausible outcomes. You're placing a bet, not giving an order.
- 05
It sticks. What happens is reported back to you, written into your record, and carried into every scene that follows. The world never snaps back.
Your three ways in
- Persuasion — talk someone toward a position.
- Information — plant an idea, leak something, hold something back.
- Presence — sometimes just being there, and being trusted, is the lever.
Talking is free. Pushing is not.
Conversation costs nothing — probe, circle, draw people out as long as the moment lasts.
You have only a few in each room, and when they are spent you can only listen. Every push is a real choice: this person, now — instead of the one beside them, or the silence you might have kept.
A push isn't a guarantee. Success in one place can sour into a problem somewhere you weren't looking.
Knowing when to push
You can feel whether you're getting through. Watch how a person answers — whether they lean in or glance at the door, confide or deflect. When you've worked a conversation to a place worth pressing, the game will offer you the moment: press them, or let it lie. Press too early, before you've found the seam, and you'll spend a move for little — or for trouble.
What you can lean on
- Who's who — every person carries a plain label: name and role. No one is a stranger.
- The talk of the room — ask for the gossip and reputation around anyone, in the voice of the time.
- The topic card — lost on what everyone's arguing about? A short briefing on the matter at hand, as a sharp contemporary would know it.
- Difficulty — set how much the game shows you. Initiate signposts the reads and names the openings. Unaided leaves the tells intact but strips the labels — read the room yourself.
What you won't be told
The game never explains what your choices will cause. You learn the shape of history the only honest way — by pushing on it and living forward. Some pushes change nothing. A few change everything, and you'll only know which by what comes after. Read the dispatches. Watch your record fill in.That's where you'll see what you've done.