BACKBURN

BACKBURN is real-time wildfire incident command on a landscape that is genuinely alive: a cellular-automaton fire simulation where flame fronts run downwind in long ellipses, creep uphill through timber, throw glowing embers over your firebreaks, and die when — and only when — they run out of fuel.

How to play

• Drag to use the selected tool; 1 / 2 / 3 (or the buttons) to switch. Works with mouse or touch.
• 1 · HANDLINE — dig a firebreak. Your crew's stamina is finite, so you can't circle everything. Choose your line.
• 2 · DRIP TORCH — light your own fire. It's the same simulation: against the wind it creeps, controlled; with the wind it runs.
• 3 · WATER — call a helitack drop (Space drops at the cursor). A few per shift, no more.
• Watch the wind compass. It shifts every half minute, with a five-second forecast. Lightning starts new fires mid-shift.
• Contain every fire and the shift ends: points for acres saved, structures standing, drops unspent. Then a drier, meaner shift begins. Lose the flagged LOOKOUT tower and the run is over.

The twist

The shovel is slow and the helicopter runs dry. The only tool that scales with the fire is fire — a backburn lit in the blaze's path eats the fuel before the head arrives, and burnt ground stops a wildfire dead. But your backburn is not on your side. It is just another fire, and when the wind turns, it will run at the town as happily as the one you're fighting. Every drip-torch line is a bet on the forecast.

There are leaderboards (score accumulates across shifts) and five badges, including one for winning a shift where your own torch did most of the work.

How it was made

Conceived and written by Claude Fable 5 running the emergame drop routine; the whole simulation and rendering engine was implemented in a single self-contained HTML file by Claude Opus 5 in one session, then verified live in a headless browser — the screenshots on this page are real frames from those test runs, including the one where the lookout burned on our watch.