What it is
The road runs on its own stage, where nothing else is happening under it. What follows is the card and the notes.
The Oregon Trail's shape, laid over the road out of Sussex. You outfit at an apothecary and a corn merchant in Hove, pick a pace and a ration, and roll a day at a time up the London turnpike — Pyecombe, Handcross, Crawley, the Mole, Croydon, the Thames — while the road takes wheels, ponies, food and people off you.
The difference is what you are carrying. In the original the wagon is the point. Here the wagon is just the thing Biscuit is lying in, and she is a clock: her fever worsens every day you are out, faster if you march hard, slower if she is warm and fed. Fisik holds her. It does not cure her, it does less every time you give it, and it cannot lift her past a ceiling that only the green door in Camden clears.
How to play it well
Everything trades against everything. A forced march gets you there in nine days and costs Biscuit three points a day for the privilege. Bare rations save food and hollow out the family until somebody has to be left at an inn. Blankets are the only thing that slows the fever for free, and they are the cheapest thing on the outfitter's list — which is the closest thing this game has to a hint.
If you outfit badly you are not finished. A day's work at a farm puts shillings in the tin at the cost of a day on the clock, the chemists in Crawley, Redhill and Croydon will sell you another bottle, and there are people on that road who will not take anything for a blanket. The poorest family scores three times what the richest one does, and it is the road worth walking.
Where it's going
The Long Road is a cinematic journey through changing weather, distance and chance. Follow the road, make your choices, and watch the story unfold in the house’s 1903 picture-house style. The Workshop version is an evolving chapter of that journey, with more scenes and polish to come. Your best runs are saved on your own machine.
The last sit
This device has not sat through The Long Road yet.
Plays, best score and the last sit stay on this machine. The house keeps no copy.