Cordon briefing

How to play

The first ten minutes

You arrive at a checkpoint in the wall, out in the street, carrying whatever your old job left you with. Under your name there is always one line saying the most useful thing to do next; when in doubt, do that. Otherwise:

• Move one block with the pad until you are standing on a building.
• Tap Go inside. You cannot search a building from the street.
• Tap Search a few times. Hospitals have kits, police stations have guns, malls have a bit of everything.
• Tap Barricade until it reads solidly barricaded, then stop. Over-build it and nobody can get in, including you.
• Spend whatever action points are left, then close the tab. They come back on their own.

Your first hour

Under the line that tells you what to do next there is a short list for new survivors: get inside a building, find something worth carrying, walk one person out through the wall. Each is worth 20 experience, once. When the list is done it goes away.

Action points

Everything costs one action point: a step, a search, a swing, a plank on the barricade. You hold at most 60, and you get one back every 1 minutes and 30 seconds, awake or not. Moving as one of the dead costs two until you learn Long Stride. Leading civilians costs two a step, because they are slow.

This is deliberate. It means a session is short, that nobody can play more of the game than you by sitting at it all day, and that the city is made of a great many small decisions rather than a few long ones.

Finding your way

You always know the blocks around you: the move pad shows the eight you can walk to, and on a wide screen the walking map beside it shows two blocks in every direction. The whole city is another matter. The Map tab stays closed until you find a digital city map; police stations, fire stations, radio towers, libraries and the checkpoints are the likeliest places to have kept one. With it you see every block by what it is and where the dead are thickest.

Inside and outside

A building block has a street and an interior, and you are in one or the other. The dead outside a barricaded building can only pull at the barricade. Everything that matters happens on one side of that line.

The living can climb in from the street while the barricade is no stronger than thinly barricaded. Above that the only way in is Ledgework, a skill that moves you roof to roof from another building next door. That is why the strong places in the city are always reached from a building beside them.

Barricades

A barricade runs from nothing up through barely, thinly, solidly and deeply barricaded to sealed and finally buried, and it gets harder to build the higher it goes. The dead cannot get through any barricade at all: they have to take it down to nothing first, and that takes many of them many hours. You cannot barricade a building that already has the dead inside it, and you cannot barricade a wrecked one until it is repaired with a toolbox.

Civilians

Civilians hide in buildings and never move. They are the whole count. Inside a building, Gather them takes up to three with you, more with Shepherd and Convoy Discipline. Walk them to any checkpoint in the wall and send them out. If you are killed while leading people, they scatter back into whatever block you died in.

Every civilian the dead reach becomes one of the dead. That is why a building nobody is holding gets worse on its own, and why the last week of a season is so much faster than the first.

Carrying things

You can carry 24 things. After that, searching finds nothing new until you drop something. Newspapers, candles and bottles are the first to go.

Being killed

At zero health you fall where you are and become a body. Nothing is lost: your skills, your experience and your things are all still yours. Stand up, for ten action points or one with Quick Up, and you are one of the dead, playing the other half of the game.

Someone with Serum Work and a syringe can bring you back. The living do this for strangers constantly, which is the strange, good heart of a game like this one.

Infection

A bite from one of the dead who has learned Foul Mouth leaves something behind. An infected survivor loses health with every single thing they do, until somebody uses a first aid kit on them. It is not a timer. It is a tax on being useful, and it will kill you in the middle of something.

Night

The city's night runs from 22:00 to 06:00 UTC, the same hours for everyone. After dark the dead are half as bad again toward anything living they can reach, and toward barricades. They are no hungrier for the people in hiding, so the count does not fall faster at night; what changes is what it costs to be in the street. The bar at the top tells you when it is night.

What you were

On your way in you say what you did before. A paramedic walks in with two first aid kits, an officer with a loaded pistol and a spare clip, fire crew with an axe, an engineer with a toolbox and a crowbar. That is the whole difference. Every skill is earned inside the wall, by everyone, the same way.

Power

Buildings have no power. A portable generator and a can of fuel will light one for a few hours: searching goes better, surgery works in hospitals, radio towers transmit, and the worst cases of Hollowed can be brought back inside a biotech lab. A running generator also makes noise, and noise is what the dead follow. One of the dead who has learned Wrecking and gets inside will wreck the generator along with everything else.

Noise

Everything you do makes some. A shotgun makes a great deal. A groan from one of the dead carries for blocks and pulls the wandering ones toward it. If a quiet corner of the city suddenly has company, somebody was loud.

Skills

Experience comes from doing things: hitting, healing, building, and above all getting civilians out. Each skill costs 100 and is yours permanently, across every season that follows. You can learn from either side's list whatever you currently are, and most players eventually do.

The radio

Carry a radio and tune it, and you hear everything broadcast on that frequency across the whole city. To transmit you need the Signals skill, or a radio tower with the power on. Nothing about this is moderated or verified. People will tell you a mall is safe. Sometimes it is.

One voice is always there. Cordon Control reports on 28.60 every hour with the real count, where the dead are thickest and how long the wall has left, and breaks in when something happens: a hospital's barricade coming down, a mall wrecked from the inside, every hundredth person out. It never knows more than the count does, and it never lies about it.

Crews

From the Radio tab you can make a crew, up to 12 people, and add survivors by name. A crew has a channel of its own that nobody else can hear and that needs no radio and no skill, and sees where each other stand on the map, ringed in blue. Anyone may leave; if the leader leaves, the longest-standing member leads. A building is held by people who agree, and this is how they agree.

Things worth reading

Newspapers and books turn up when you search. They are not worth carrying for long, but they can be read, from the Gear tab, for nothing. They are how you find out what the city thought was happening in the week before it stopped thinking.

The season

A season runs for 21 days. It ends early if every soul is accounted for, or if every one of the dead is put down. Otherwise the cordon closes the wall and whoever is still inside is counted as lost. Then a new city is generated and everyone starts again in it, keeping their skills and their record.

Coming back

Away for a couple of hours or more, and your first screen back tells you what happened to you meanwhile: whether the dead got at you in your sleep, what the city lost and walked out while you were gone, and the last few things that happened in the block you were standing in. Dismiss it when you have read it.

If a season ended while you were away, you are shown the end of it first: how the city went, the final count, your own line, and the season's five. Then you go into the new city, with everything you learned.

What cannot happen to you

• You cannot be knocked out of a season. The dead are a side, not a defeat.
• You cannot lose your skills or your experience, ever.
• Nobody can buy anything. There is nothing to buy.

Pictures, colours, and the things on the walls

Every kind of place has its own colour, on the map and beside its name, and a small picture of where you are: the lights show when the generator runs and flicker as it does, the dead in reach stand in the frame and sway, and night is dark. Hide it if you prefer the words. If your device is set to reduce motion, nothing here moves.

Titles

What you have done across every season earns you a title, shown on your page and beside your name in the standings: walked ten out, put down a hundred, brought one back, died and got up, held a season to the end. They are worked out from the record, never bought, and never lost.

Some streets have billboards and some walls have posters. They are adverts, always marked as adverts, and they never change what happens in the game. If you would like one of your own, there is a page for that in the footer.

What this site records

No tracking scripts, no advertising, no cookie beyond the one that keeps you signed in. The site counts how many times each page is loaded each day and which site, if any, a visitor came from. It does not record addresses, devices or anything that could identify a visitor. For a signed-in player it keeps which days you opened the game, because the one thing the makers want to know is whether anybody comes back. An advert on a wall counts how many times it was on a screen and how many times it was followed, and nothing about who.