In the Mountains

Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2011. You command a remote combat outpost in a valley the maps call contested. The job is not to win a battle — it is to survive a tour, keep a platoon alive, and convince the villages up the draw that you are worth talking to.

What you actually do

• Plan patrols on a topographic map. The valley is procedurally generated from a seed you choose, and the terrain is the real opponent: ridgelines, draws and dead ground decide who sees whom first.
• Give orders, not clicks. Each squad carries a standing operating procedure — movement posture, what to do on contact, rules of engagement — and then has to live with it.
• Fight per-bullet engagements. Every round is simulated against line of sight and concealment. 60mm and 81mm mortars, gun runs, Hellfire and a 9-line MEDEVAC are a call away, and every one of them costs you something.
• Wage counterinsurgency. Presence patrols, census, cordon and search, an intel feed that only fills up if you go out and talk to people. Battalion hands down directives; the valley ignores them.

One continuous clock runs the whole tour — 60 to 270 days — at 1x to 16x. It does not stop while you think. Space pauses, T skips to the next event.

Notes

Inspired by Sebastian Junger's War, the documentaries Restrepo and Korengal, Jake Tapper's The Outpost, and after-action accounts from the Pech and Korengal valleys. It is a work of fiction and a game, dedicated with respect to those who served there.

How it was made

Built with Claude Code, by an agent fleet working to one standing bar: that a skeptical soldier reading a field manual would recognise the behaviour as real. Nine days of work, 37 chapters, 24 full reports, 26 tracked issues and 20+ headless test harnesses — all of it shipped inside the game as a development archive next to the Field Manual, because how it was made is part of the thing.

The working doctrine was five moves: metricize the complaint before touching code, fan out specialists on open problems, attack your own answer, prove the fix with a before/after number, then write the practice into CLAUDE.md so it cannot be skipped next time.