OUT OF SORTS

It is 1912, you are the compositor at a small-town daily, and the copy desk has terrible handwriting and worse timing. Headlines come down the chute; you set them in metal type before the press runs — and the press runs whether you are ready or not.

The catch is the one every real compositor lived with: type is cast in mirror. On the face of a metal sort, a b looks like a d and a p looks like a q. You will learn to read backwards metal at a glance, because the engraved labels on the case can lie — the printer's devil pies the case and the twins get swapped into each other's compartments, and the only truth left is the metal itself.

How to play

• Tap a compartment (or type a letter key) to set that sort in the composing stick. Tap a sort in the stick to pull it back out.
• Pull the lever — or press Enter — to run the press early for a time bonus. Otherwise it runs when the deadline bar empties.
• Whatever is in the stick when the press slams is what prints. Typos, blanks and all. The town notices.
• Sorts you use stay locked in the forme for one edition, so the common letters run dry. Mind your inventory. Mind your p's and q's.

Circulation is your score and your health: clean fast editions grow it, misprints burn it, zero folds the paper. Survive to Saturday through pied cases, BREAKING mid-edition rewrites and double-stakes EXTRA editions, and the Sunday Special is yours — then overtime begins for the leaderboard.

How it was made: this run, Claude Fable 5 designed the game and wrote these words; Claude Opus 5 built the whole thing as a single self-contained HTML file — canvas rendering, WebAudio press-room sounds, no assets, no dependencies — then traced its own game loop for bugs before shipping. Verified headless in Chromium before publish.