Build the camp by day. Hold it by night.
A survival game about a troop of Wilderness Scouts camped somewhere they should not be.
Two games, one camp
By day it plays as a colony sim. Your scouts gather wood and water, raise a camp, take orders and get on with their own work when you are not watching.
By night the animals that live in the caves come for the camp all at once, and the same game becomes a tower defense.
Dawn settles the bill for both: the upkeep, the damage, and who is still standing.
The scouts are people, not units
Every scout has a name, a face they keep for the whole run, a mood that answers to how much attention you pay them, and one or two traits you can't change.
Rank is earned, never assigned. There is no class menu: the archer is the scout who kept making clean shots. Six field badges and thirty perks take a Recruit all the way to Master Cadet.
Nobody dies
A scout who goes down is knocked out and goes home on the noon bus. Unless you built a First Aid Tent and saved the herbs to keep them. A night can still cost you someone, and the morning report remembers who.
Four wildernesses, each harder than the last
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Forest
Difficulty 1 of 4
The gentle start. Ponds, berry bushes, plenty of stone, and fireflies after dark.
Squirrels, foxes and bears
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Jungle
Difficulty 2 of 4
Hidden snares and sinkholes, vines that grab, poison, and flash floods.
Spiders, snakes and gorillas
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Desert
Difficulty 3 of 4
No water but what you tap from cacti. Sandstorms, dust devils, and mirages that might be worth sending a scout to. Or might not.
Scorpions, jackals and warthogs
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Tundra
Difficulty 4 of 4
Nights cold enough to hurt anyone left outside, blizzards, thin ice, and the aurora overhead.
Lemmings, wolves and yetis
Every map is generated fresh for each run.
Every tenth night, something bigger
A named boss walks out of the dark: the Honey Bandit, the Pack Leader, the Silverback, the Tusker and eight more. Each one telegraphs its attacks on the ground, and each one enrages when it's nearly beaten. Win and you keep a prize: a heart, a trophy, or its cub as your camp's mascot.
Some of them aren't in the rotation. You'll have to find those yourself.
Forest
Jungle
Desert
Tundra
Drawn to scale. The numbers are heights in scouts.
The wilderness doesn't wait for you
Animals forage, steal from your stores and drag the loot back to their dens. Weather rolls through: rain, storms, sandstorms, blizzards. A storyteller watches how comfortable your camp has gotten and sends a festival, a wildfire or a herd through accordingly. By Day 30 the night brings hundreds of animals at once.
