Yearfall

Yearfall is a kingdom you cannot save — only manage. One hundred people, two thousand eight hundred bushels of grain, a thousand acres of land. Ten years to prove you can keep them alive.

This is the seventh game in Volume 2 — Patterns of State — and the purest of them: no opponent, no maze, no hidden information. Just three numbers and the trade-offs between them. Every value is on screen; the difficulty is entirely in deciding what to do with each.

The new idea is the whole game: state that persists and compounds across turns. Each year you spend grain to feed people and to plant fields, and what you have left — plus a harvest you cannot control — becomes next year's starting position. A bad choice does not punish you at once; it narrows what you can do a year or two later. That is delayed consequence, and learning to play it is learning to think past the current turn.

What you will build:

• A kingdom held in three persistent variables — population, grain, land
• Feeding under a constraint, and the starvation that follows underfeeding (the new idea)
• Planting, and a random harvest that turns seed grain into more grain — or not
• The ten-year loop, where population grows and choices compound (the new idea)
• Trading land at a price that shifts each year
• The finished game: a year-end report, a final rating, atmosphere, and replay

6 units. About 7–9 hours. This builds on Meet BASIC and Volume 1 — earlier games assumed.