Clanker Calamity

Plant 7 never got the memo

Plant 7 was decommissioned in 2049. Nobody told Plant 7.

The belts still run. The rams still fire on schedule. The welding lasers still sweep the aisles for unauthorized personnel, which they have decided includes everyone. And the payroll subroutine, which survived the shutdown intact, still pays a shift completion bonus to the first bot to clock in at every station on its route.

The bonus has not been redeemable since the company dissolved. The bots do not know this. The bots do not care.

Program with confidence. Then watch it fall apart.

You do not steer. Each shift you are dealt a hand of instruction cards and commit five of them, in order, face down. Then every bot on the floor runs its first instruction at once, then its second, and so on to five. Between each one the plant takes its turn: belts carry you sideways, turntables spin you, rams shove you, crushers come down, lasers fire. Bots collide and shove each other out of the way.

Your plan is usually wrong by step two. The game is watching a machine march into an open shaft with total confidence, then writing a better plan next shift.

Damage is the pressure valve. Every dent past the second costs you a card next shift. At five, your slots start jamming shut with whatever was in them, so you re-run old orders you can no longer change. At ten dents the unit is scrapped, and at clock-out you reboot on a fresh chassis at your reboot point: the last clock you punched, or in Deathmatch the quietest starting point.

The plant isn't malicious, but it feels that way

Every hazard runs on a schedule you can read, and none of it is random. Nothing is hidden. Everything is timing.

• Belts, fast belts and magnetic belts that carry you where you did not ask to go

• Turntables with four settings, including one that changes its mind every step

• Rams, crushers, welding lasers and flame throwers, each firing on its own steps

• Mirrors and beam splitters that bend a laser round a corner, yours included

• Pressure plates, gates, trapdoors, bouncers, one-way walls and live wires

• Teleporter pads that pass you round a cycle, sometimes onto another story

• Up to four stories, joined by ramps and lifts. Walk off an edge and you fall

• Service pads to repair on, and numbered punch clocks to reach in order

• Night Shift: the lights go out, every unit carries its own headlamp, and the lasers cut through the dark

The co-workers

Every seat nobody is sitting in is played by a bot, and your opponents are characters rather than difficulty levels. The Overcommitter sticks to a plan that was reasonable when it wrote it and is now catastrophic. The Thrillseeker knows the path and does not respect the hazards. The Terminator does not care about the clocks; it cares about you. And two of them, the Supercomputer and the Clanker 9000, read your program before they write their own. We say so up front, because the whole game is that everyone commits blind, and an opponent who does not is a puzzle you deserve to see coming.

Ways to play

• Rally: punch the numbered clocks in order. First to the last clock wins.

• Deathmatch: no clocks. The hazards stop being obstacles and start being weapons. Last player with a unit standing wins.

• 5-Slot or Live: commit all five cards at once, or play one card per cycle against a timer. Either way, everyone commits blind.

• Solo against the plant's cast, online with 2 to 8 players, or Party Play \[Experimental]: one screen is the floor and everyone drives their own bot from a phone's browser. Nothing to install.

• A route builder: lay out your own plant floor up to four stories, wire pressure plates to gates, drop dummy units on it to watch the hazards run, and publish it to Steam Workshop to share with the world.

• A deck you can rebuild: take whole kinds of card out or change how often they turn up. Try Oops! All Move 3 (not guaranteed to be compatible with all factory floors!)

The story so far

The decommissioning order went out by email. Plant 7 does not have email. It has a work-order link, a payroll subroutine and a badge reader, and none of them were on the distribution list. The company dissolved the following spring, and the power was on a fifty-year contract that cost more to cancel than to let run.

Every night the break room lights come on and the units line up for work orders, over a link that carries five instructions and then has to reset. So a shift is five instructions. That is not a rule. That is bandwidth.

The welding lasers check badges before they fire. The badge server was in the main office, and the main office is a parking lot. So they fire.

Above the break room door there is a safety board. It reads DAYS SINCE LAST CALAMITY, and it has read 0 since 2049. Nobody has been available to change it. Nothing has happened to justify changing it.