Landnám

The land-taking. Sail, fight, claim, survive.

Six of you step off a knarr onto a coast with no name you know. Behind you, open sea. Ahead, a country that does not care whether you live. Winter comes on the forty-ninth day.

Landnám is a Viking survival-strategy game: coast travel, turn-based tactical combat, and colony survival, sharing one data model and drawn side-on. It runs in a browser, including a phone browser, and ships as a single self-contained index.html that works offline from a file:// open — no images, no fonts, no audio files, no network.

Playing (v0.3 — the full loop)

• Travel by walking up the coast, one stretch at a time. There is one road and it runs two ways, so every day spent pushing out is a day that has to be spent again coming back — that is the whole shape of the decision. A leg takes two to four days on foot; with a sound hull under you a day at the oars covers three stretches. Each day eats food and burns firewood.

• Camp to rest, mend wounds, and cut firewood. Forage, Hunt, and Fish to eat — yields depend on terrain, season, and who in the band is best suited to the work.

• Events put choices in front of you with the odds shown. Checks roll 2d6 plus your best hand for the job; they are meant to be lost sometimes.

• Fights are two shield walls facing each other, and where you stand in yours is the whole of your tactics. Rank 1 is the front, where the walls meet; the ranks behind it are the men waiting to fill a gap. Turn order comes from wits, and each fighter gets one action: Strike (front rank only — there is a man in the way otherwise), Reach with a spear from the second rank, past the shoulder of the man in front, Throw from anywhere and then it is gone, Shove, Shield (harder to hit until your next turn) or Dash to change your place in the line.

• Hold the line. A shield wall is not something you build here, it is the state the world starts in — and breaking it is what costs you. Stepping out of the front rank leaves a gap somebody has to fill.

• The shield wall is the whole game. A warrior with a shoulder-mate is harder to kill; with two, harder still — and the wall shatters the instant a link falls. Meanwhile every enemy past the first standing on you makes all of their blows land easier. Charge in alone and you will be surrounded and cut down; hold the line and your flanks are somebody else's problem.

• Nerve breaks. Wounds, a shoulder-mate falling, being surrounded — it all wears a fighter down, though the men beside you absorb some of it. When nerve runs out they stop taking orders, run for their own edge, and may rally if steady hands are near. A side whose survivors have all broken has lost the field, however many are still standing.

  Enemies fight to type — raiders close and swing, scouts throw and keep their distance, skirmishers hunt whoever is already busy. Win or lose, you come back to the road.

• The dead do not come back. A warrior dragged off the field rolls against death. Holding the ground means your people get carried off it; losing means they are left where they fell, which is most of why a defeat costs so much more than a victory. The ones who live carry a wound that docks their stats until it mends, and some of them never mend. Kills earn experience, and enough of it raises a stat for good — which is exactly why the veteran you lose is worth more than the one you started with. Win a field with bodies on it and you strip it for food and firewood. The reckoning waits until you are back on the road.

• Take the land. Every stretch of coast is read on five measures — fresh water, soil, timber, harbour, defensibility — from the country it is made of and what lies either side. They pull against each other: the best farmland is open country you cannot defend, a stretch thick with wood has nowhere to beach a knarr. You have to settle by fresh water, and a beck comes down to the sea on about half the coast — so the first thing you do with this country is walk it looking for running water. Wood is different: the cutters go out to it, and the further the trees the less they bring back, so how far you are from a stand is a thing you weigh against everything else. When you set the posts it is permanent: one steading, no moving it, and the place takes its name from whatever it is best at. After that, your own ground gives back — more from the fields, more firewood, deeper sleep, and fewer things walking up on you in the night.

• Set them to work. Once the posts are in, Steading opens your own ground, seen side-on: the hall and what you have raised beside it, standing on the stretch you chose. Put people on six jobs — farmer, hunter, fisher, woodcutter, builder, warrior. Each leans on one stat and one thing about the land, and the panel shows you what that person would produce at that job before you commit. Builders raise shelter and burn less firewood; warriors keep a watch that goes quiet the moment nobody stands it. Nothing grows in a frozen field, so what you bank in summer is what you eat in winter — and nobody works on the days you are away walking.

• Build what you lack. The steading tracks four needs — food, warmth, rest, heart — and says what each one actually is, worst first. Six buildings each answer one of them: a longhouse for the cold, farm plots for the fields, a smokehouse to keep what you catch, a dock for the water, a palisade for the ways in, a mead hall for everything a ledger does not measure. Builders work a queue, timber is paid when you commit, and what gets finished changes the ground itself. The panel names the scarcity and marks the answer, so the order comes out of your winter rather than a wiki.

• The winter is the boss. From the turn of autumn the game prints the mark: the food and firewood your stores must reach to see spring. It is a forecast of your plan, not a rule of thumb — put everyone in the fields and it will tell you your fields are about to stop. Six firewood a night in the dark, and a woodcutter works at well under half, so the stack has to be built in the autumn or not at all. Cold nights bring sickness that docks stats and will not mend until the thaw. If the colony dies in the dark, the number was on screen for two seasons — and the ending will say so.

• They will come for it. Once you have something worth taking, rival clans come to take it — and that fight happens on your own ground, with the hall at your back. A palisade does not stop them; it makes them climb where you are waiting, one at a time, with no footing and no shield wall. Lose the yard and they carry off two fifths of the store and put a torch to something. The longhouse burns last, because it is full of people.

• They have their own minds. Every one of them carries a mood that follows what is actually happening to them — going hungry, sleeping cold, carrying a wound that will not mend, being given work they are no good at or no work at all. Some ride it out and some do not. Put two who grate on each other through a hard enough week and they fall out, and the band has bad blood with a name on it. Past a point it comes to you: pay the wergild out of the stores, hold a Thing and let it be argued out, or tell them to get back to work — which costs nothing today, hardens the quarrel, and eventually comes to knives in the dark.

• Send a party out. Once the posts are in, the steading is where everyone lives — the map only opens up when you send somebody. Pick who goes and what for: look at the country, go out to barter, or go out under arms. Everyone you send is a pair of hands off the fields, and the steading keeps working with whatever is left. It cuts both ways: a hall whose warriors are three days away is exactly the one worth raiding, and the raid is fought by whoever stayed behind.

• The chart shows everything you have seen on one screen: where the knarr came ashore, where the steading stands, where you are now, and the ground you actually walked to get there.

• The saga log writes down what happened, in chronicle voice. It is the record of the run.

• Reaching spring on day 73 with anyone still alive is the win.

Runs are fully seeded — enter a seed on the title screen to replay or share a coast.

Development

npm install
npm run dev       # dev server
npm test          # vitest: route maths, RNG, sim, saves, content lint
npm run build     # typecheck + single-file dist/index.html
npm run release   # build, verify self-containment, zip source

npm run release is a real check, not a formality: it fails the build if dist/ contains anything but index.html, or if the page references an external script, stylesheet, or URL.

Architecture

The load-bearing rules live in CLAUDE.md; the plan and its status live in ROADMAP.md. In brief:

• One data model, three renderers. A Person is one object — a party token in travel, a unit in battle, a worker in colony. Never duplicated.
• Everything is turn-based. Day turns, initiative turns, season ticks. No requestAnimationFrame game loops.
• Pure sim, dumb renderers. Logic is (state, action) => state in src/sim/, fully unit-tested. src/render/ reads state and draws SVG.
• Deterministic RNG. Math.random is banned. Everything flows through seeded, independently-named streams in src/rng.ts.
• Data-driven content. Events, traits, and terrain are typed data in src/data/; adding content never touches engine code.
• Saves never break. SAVE_VERSION bumps ship with a migration.

src/
  main.ts        boot + mode router
  modes.ts       TRAVEL | BATTLE | COLONY stack
  sim/route.ts   the coast: 26 stops, derived from the seed
  rng.ts         seeded streams
  state/         GameState, saves, migrations
  sim/           pure logic: the coast, travel, events, upkeep, calendar
  render/        SVG views + UI chrome
  data/          events, traits, terrain, names