No tutorial videos. No energy bar to refill with your wallet. Here's the machine, plainly.
The whole game is five words along the top. today is your runner and what there is to do: the scene, one thing to press, the feed, and everything about them folded underneath. out is the three ways to spend a day, town ground, a mountain route, or the race calendar. region is the other people and the four divisions. shop is kit, gels and the physio. account is the job, the standing orders, the holiday and the notifications. Anything that needs explaining is in the FAQ rather than on the screen.
You create one runner and that's your allocation, permanently. Stats are rolled, shaped by a class and a region. They get a job, a look you're dealt and can change one arrow-key at a time, and a face you don't control, because it shows how they actually feel. Injured looks injured. The night before a race looks nervous.
The look is settled when you register. Take a minute over it. The two things that change it afterwards are a hat you go and earn, and the shoes and singlet you buy, which the sprite wears.
One day in the world is one real day. A session takes its real length to resolve. A drill is home inside the hour, a long run owns half the day. You start it, you go and live your life, a ping tells you how it went.
One session a day to begin with. The afternoon slot is earned, at level 5, and a demanding job can still eat it on a weekday.
Every morning your runner wakes, at an hour their job sets rather than yours, and reports in. That ping opens the day.
Sessions build the qualities that matter on trail: climbing, descending, endurance, race IQ, a stomach that holds. Load accumulates; rest sheds it. Push into the red often enough and the ladder starts: fresh, niggle, strained, injured. Every rung was warned about first.
Absence costs too, and it goes both ways: fitness you pushed a long way above where your class started sheds faster than fitness you never touched, so the top of a career takes holding rather than banking. Skip a few days and nothing much happens. Skip a month and there is ground to make up. It stops at the runner you started as and never goes below, so it is never a wipe.
Real Wellington ground, sent in by the people who run it, each piece held by whoever's posted the fastest recorded time on it. You attempt one whenever you're willing to pay the load, and going for it counts as that day's training. The ground says what it builds.
The field contesting it isn't a leaderboard of ghosts. It's a population of simulated locals with their own physiology and temperament: mountain goats, gravity merchants, diesels, weekend warriors. They train, peak, back off, get hurt, and take ground, including yours, while you sleep. It only ever changes hands to a faster time.
WUU2K is one morning at three distances: 21, 45 and 65 kilometres, all finishing at the velodrome. XTRAIL West Wind is 17 kilometres on the wind farm at Mākara. The Te Ahumairangi handicap is every Wednesday, and it's free. Enter one and it sits on a real date while a named start list gathers.
On the day, you play it live: a branching terminal narrative where the doors that open are the ones your stats earned. Form on the day is real. So is the field. Your finishing place comes from the same model that timed everyone else, not from a dice roll.
The Wednesday race goes at the gun whether you're watching or not, and the whole start line is placed together at one cutoff. Set a plan beforehand and it answers anything you miss, at a cost on the clock. Being there is worth time, and we tell you how much.
Three Tararua routes carry a mark instead: Jumbo–Holdsworth, the Southern Crossing, and the S–K at 74 kilometres. They're free, they're hours, and you go whenever you like. Being broke is no reason not to.
You play them the way you play a race, except the calls unlock as the clock reaches the ground they're on, so the next one can be hours away. The S–K isn't set off on, it's declared: it goes at dawn tomorrow, at your own wake hour, with tomorrow's real forecast on the board to decide on. Walking into a bad window is allowed. It's just costed.
One region so far, Wellington, and the region screen opens with the people: most of the runners on those hills are simulated, a few of them aren't, and a person is marked wherever runners are listed. Press watch on anybody, human or simulated, and what they get up to turns up in your feed. It's one way and they're never told.
Under that is the ladder. Everybody is ranked on fitness and cut into four groups of fixed size, Tops down to Valley, and promotion and relegation settle when the real season turns rather than while you're at work. Every name is a dossier: form, a scouting report in words, head-to-head seconds on the ground you've both run, and how they're going today. Nothing here notifies you. A board that pinged you when you dropped a place would be a nag.
Shoes accumulate kilometres and go lugless. Poles fatigue toward a snap. The head torch has a battery; gels get eaten. Road shoes on wet rock cost you time, the dark costs more without a light. But kit only ever removes a penalty. Nothing in the shop makes you faster than your legs. You'll always be warned before something fails.
Some of it is permission rather than friction. The mountain routes and the longer races publish a compulsory list, the way real races do, and without it a route won't let you set off and a start line will turn you away. So the first fortnight of wages has somewhere to go.
Your job pays a daily wage, and the demanding ones eat the weekday afternoon slot and pile on stress. A student trains flat out on instant noodles; a nurse earns properly and has to manage the load. You can change job once a month, free.
Living costs come off the wage before it reaches the purse, so rent, power and a supermarket shop are the difference between what a job pays and what you bank. What's left buys gear, gels, race entries, a look, and an hour of somebody's attention when a week has gone badly. It never buys fitness, a result, or a mend for an injury you ran into with your eyes open.
Standing orders, if you want them: set a focus and a risk appetite, and an unstarted session runs itself, always a bit worse than showing up, never into an injury nobody chose. It's free, like all automation here.
And if you're genuinely going away, book a holiday. A few weeks of the year, declared ahead, with the slide at half pace and the stress gauge cleared. It doesn't pause the world, because nothing does, and your runner spends it on a towel. Real runners take an off-season and come back rested and a little slower; so does yours.
The game installs to your phone as an app and reaches you by push: the morning wake, ground lost, race eve, a warning worth hearing. Quiet hours hold everything overnight. You tune all of it.
It's live rather than finished, and things will move under you. The FAQ goes a layer deeper than this page and writes down the rules we hold ourselves to, so you can hold us to them when something goes sideways.