Where every game starts

Every game of Groundwork starts with the same small story. A group of settlers was on its way over the old road when a wheel of their wagon split. Home is too far to walk back to, so they make camp where they stopped. That is your town.

The first version of that camp was a wagon with its wheels sunk into the ground and four tents in a row. It looked like a parking lot. Now the wagon is properly broken: three wheels on the ground, the fourth split off and that corner propped up on stones, with a spoke lying beside them. And the tents stand in a half circle round a campfire, each facing the fire. The wagon still holds what they brought: planks, bread and water.

The eight settlers are no longer eight loose people. They come as households, and a household shares a surname and a tent. When cabins go up, a family moves in together, and only splits up when there is no other home with room. Everyone has a name now too, made from the world’s seed, so nothing about it has to be saved. Most are plain names of the time, Edith Thornton or Walter Crofton. About one in twenty is a pun that still passes as a name. I will not spoil them all, but Justin Case is in there.

In the evening the campfire is where people go. Sitting by it counts as leisure, like a walk among the trees, which matters while the town has nothing better to offer.

In my first playtest the tents got marked for removal as soon as the game began, and nobody came to take them down. That is fixed in two ways. Anyone without a job is now a builder, the way loggers handle trees: during work hours they walk to the nearest building marked for removal and take it down. And the tents are left alone; they last three days and fall apart on their own, so building cabins in time is the job of the first days. The wagon is the one exception. Once the town has a stockpile, its load goes there and the wagon is taken apart.