THE GOAT TRAIL
Two hundred days of dead corridor between the Barn and Candlemass. Reader beware — you steer.
How the goat trail works
It is the 1991 trail game, moved four hundred years and a very long way out. You pick a trade, name 5 crew, buy what you think you will need at Dock Nine, and run 2040 units of dead corridor to a colony called Candlemass. There are 18 stops on the way and about a hundred and forty days between the ends of it.
The two decisions that decide most runs are the ones the old game gave you: how hard you run the drive and what the crew eat. Push the pace and you arrive early with a crew that cannot stand up. Cut the rations and you arrive with rations.
The other half is a choose-your-own-adventure. When something happens you get numbered choices and a page number, the way the paperbacks did it, and the choice is real: the same fire can cost you a day, a hold, or a person, depending on whether you vent it, fight it or seal it.
People come off the manifest. There are 48 ways to be lost on this trail — the ordinary ones, a sick-list that a hundred and forty years of sealed air made strange, 8 named fires that each carry a genome and a way to be fought, and a short column of things that have happened exactly once. One of them is still dysentery. That was never going to be improved on.
You only score if you arrive. Surviving crew are worth the most, then the hauler, the pods, the spares, the suits, the cells, what is left in the tanks and what is left in the float — and the whole tally is multiplied by the trade you picked. The trade with the least money multiplies by three.
What you can be
The route
| Units out | Stop | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | The Barn — Dock Nine | The last agricultural station in the inner system, and the last place anything is cheap. |
| 102 | Kettle Gate | An old customs ring nobody staffs any more. It still says WELCOME on the inside face. |
| 185 | The Spine | A shoal of shipbreaker debris eleven kilometres deep, sorted by a current nobody has mapped. |
| 304 | Halfway Light | A navigation light that is not halfway to anything. It was halfway to somewhere that closed. |
| 489 | Station Vesper | Four hundred people, one dock arm, and a bar that has been open continuously since 2249. |
| 591 | The Long Dark | A hundred units with no beacon, no traffic and no reason for either. |
| 682 | Slack Tide | A gravity shear that turns over twice a day and is honest about neither turn. |
| 748 | Orchard Dock | Nine hydroponics rings, six of them still running. It smells like a room you remember. |
| 869 | The Knives | A micrometeor belt with a name that undersells it. |
| 969 | Holloway Reach | Wide, slow, and full of things that were haulers. |
| 1037 | Station Meridian | The last station with a doctor in it. She will tell you that, twice, before you ask. |
| 1189 | The Candle Fields | Two hundred wrecks, and about forty of them are still alight after ninety years. |
| 1321 | The Ninth Gate | Candlemass customs, four hundred units early, staffed and serious. |
| 1429 | Blackstock Yard | A breaker's yard with a wall of carbon shadows on it, and a shop that sells everything. |
| 1618 | The Great Quiet | A hundred and ninety units where nothing transmits, including you. |
| 1714 | Terminus Shoal | The last shoal. Everything that did not make Candlemass is in here somewhere. |
| 1860 | Last Light Station | One dock, one bar, one decision. |
| 2040 | Candlemass | Open berths, a permanent record, and a light you can see from four hundred units out. |
The back of the book
Every run ends somewhere, and there are 32 places for it to end. Some of them are not on the list until you have found them. The book and the manifest are both kept in your own browser, so they follow you between runs and go nowhere else.
More small games are in the game library, and every score lands on the leaderboard. Nothing here touches the eternal scoreboard — only !cat and !goat in Twitch chat ever score a verdict.