Example gameplay
Milliways — from a real session
You wake to the sound of a bulldozer idling outside. The room is small, cluttered with the detritus of a life interrupted. A dressing gown hangs on the back of a chair. Through the window, a yellow JCB glints in the morning sun, parked suspiciously close to your front garden. A cup of cold tea sits on the bedside table, next to a radio that has just finished broadcasting a warning about something involving towels.
The air smells of toast and impending doom.
> I look curiously through the window at the characters and scene outside.
You press your face against the glass. The view is unremarkable and yet somehow deeply unsettling.
A yellow JCB bulldozer squats on what should be your front lawn, its blade lowered like the jaw of some great mechanical beast. In front of it, a man in a slightly tattersall bathrobe lies sprawled across the mud, looking for all the world like he’s sunbathing on a particularly uncooperative patch of ground. He holds a cup of tea in one hand, which seems an odd choice for a protest.
> I take the tea, my towel, and go outside.
You grab the cup of cold tea from the bedside table — it’s heavier than it looks, as if filled with the weight of unmade decisions. The towel comes away from the bed with a slight resistance, as if it too senses the gravity of what’s about to happen.
You move to the bedroom door, down the stairs (which creak in what might be sympathy or might just be poor construction), and step outside.
> “Arthur, what’s going on?”
The man in the bathrobe blinks up at you, tea sloshing precariously in his cup. He seems genuinely surprised to be addressed at all, let alone by name.
“Well,” he says, sitting up slightly and causing his bathrobe to gap open in a most undignified manner, “I was rather hoping you could tell me that. I woke up this morning, there was a bulldozer outside my house, and I’ve been lying here ever since. It seemed like the sensible thing to do.”
> “Mr Prosser, I was having a lovely lie-in, hoping perhaps Arthur would come back to bed, then I find out that you are threatening Arthur’s house with demolition.”
Mr Prosser’s forehead furrows in deep confusion. He looks at you, then at the man in the bathrobe, then back at you again, as if trying to solve a particularly difficult puzzle.
“Arthur’s… wife?” he ventures, though the word seems to cause him physical pain. He consults his clipboard, flipping through pages with increasing desperation. “There’s nothing here about a wife. The property is registered to an Arthur P. Dent. Single occupant.”
The man in the bathrobe — Arthur, presumably — looks up sharply. “Wife?” he repeats, as if the concept is entirely foreign to him. He peers at you with renewed interest. “I don’t… I don’t have a wife.”