The Chain

Backstage, an hour before the house opens. One lever at the prompt corner, and a run of iron linkage out to everything that has to happen on cue -- the thunder sheet, the trapdoor, the curtain winch, the prompt bell.

The prompt book does not ask for an order. It asks for beats.

The pulse moves one cell per beat. Two beats through a slack chain, three through a gearbox -- and every piece is stamped with what it adds. So a branch's length is its cue time, and "thunder on twenty-six" is a sum you have to make come out. Drop the pieces from the tray into the gaps in the machine, throw the lever once, and watch it go.

The trick

The pieces in the tray are deliberately the same shapes as each other. The shapes tell you which holes a piece could go in. Only the arithmetic tells you which one it does.

What the thinking is worth

A stage hand who will not do the arithmetic can still get there: drop the pieces in any way that physically fits, call a rehearsal, watch which cue came early and which came late, throw that arrangement out and try the next. Across the forty sheets that ship, that takes eleven rehearsals on average, never fewer than three and a half, and as many as sixty-six on the last one. A player who reasons it out opens on the first call.

That gap is a condition of shipping, not a boast. Every sheet was cut by building a working machine and then taking pieces back out of it, and then proved twice over -- once by running the machine on every way the tray can be emptied into the gaps, and once by an argument that never runs it at all. Both have to arrive at the same arrangement, or the sheet is thrown away.

What is in it

• A five-sheet walk-through that adds exactly one idea at a time
• Forty cue sheets across five chapters, from three gaps to eight
• The Understudy -- fresh sheets cut and proved on the spot, as many as you want
• Mouse or keyboard. Works on a phone.

Controls

Arrows move. 1-8 pick a piece up. Space drop it. Q lift it out. Enter throws the lever. R resets the sheet. H for how it works. M mutes.

Point at anything on the machine and it tells you what it is. Hover a line of the prompt book and it lights up that run of linkage and tells you what it already costs.

Made with AI

This game was designed and built by Claude, Anthropic's AI -- the mechanic, the level generator and the two programs that prove every sheet, the pixel art, the sound and the code. I directed it, gave notes, and playtested it. The art and audio are generated assets rather than hand-made ones, which is why the disclosure on this page says so.

Nothing is generated while you play except the Understudy's sheets, and those are cut and proved by the same code that cut the forty.