Dead Handshake

DEAD HANDSHAKE

Six hours. Two nuclear powers. No reliable information.

It is midnight in the Castellan Watch Room. The Republic of Varyn and the Union of Selka are eleven days into a crisis over a mountain pass that neither side can afford to lose. You are the duty director for the night watch.

You do not fly anything. You do not aim anything. You decide what to believe.

Reports arrive from sensors that can be fooled, sources that can be turned, allies who repeat your own data back to you, and a hotline whose four-minute handshake may stop answering. Six advisers will tell you six different things. Each of them is sometimes right. Each of them is sometimes wrong, and not always for the same reason.

Everything you do can be seen from Sarvo, and Sarvo decides for itself what it means. Disperse your forces to protect them, and a frightened leadership reads preparation for a first strike. Stand down to calm them, and a different leadership reads weakness. Waiting for confirmation can save the world. Waiting can also be the wrong decision.

WHAT YOU DO

- Verify, at a cost in time: second arrays, satellite passes, forensics, a human source you may burn by asking.

- Talk: reassure, explain, warn, bluff, propose a stand-down, or say nothing on the line to Sarvo.

- Decide posture, the strategic reserve, civil defence, public statements, mediation.

- Recommend. Sometimes refuse.

WHAT MAKES EACH NIGHT DIFFERENT

- Five crises, each with three hidden truths: a warning that may be a ghost, a test, or real; a border explosion that may be an accident, sabotage, or a staged probe; a dead hotline; a vanished premier; an ally that acts alone.

- Six Selkan leadership tendencies you are never told, only shown.

- Twelve endings, from a quiet record that historians find hard to write about to the ones nobody writes about at all.

- Every night gives you a seed. Replay the same crisis and find out whether that warning was ever real.

A night takes twenty to thirty minutes. There is no score. There is a record.

ACCESSIBILITY

Text size, high contrast, instant text, reduced motion, and decision timers that can be extended or switched off. Every alert uses shape and word as well as colour. No information is carried only by sound. Full keyboard play.

CONTENT WARNING

Themes of nuclear war, mass casualties, civilian danger and stressful decisions under time pressure. Nothing is shown graphically; consequences are described in restrained text.

A WORK OF FICTION

Every state, city, person, alert level, sensor and procedure in this game is invented. It contains no real weapons, targets or procedures. It is about how easy it is to start a war when everyone is afraid, everyone has incomplete information, and everyone thinks they are being defensive.

All sound is synthesised in your browser. No tracking. Saves stay on your device.