The Sandbox Notebook
Open-ended games, written down
Ordered by hours logged, because in a game without an ending that is the only figure that cannot be argued with.
Six entries are written up in full. The remaining eight are summarised here with their figures, and will be written out as the backlog clears.
Ninety-six hours across four months. A water table, one badly-placed channel dug on the first afternoon, and a settlement that grew around the mistake instead of correcting it.
Seventy-one hours. Survival for the first thirty, then forty spent building a tower with no purpose at all, which is the point at which the notebook became interesting.
Fifty-two hours and the highest invented figure in the notebook at eighty-one per cent. Almost nothing we remember was authored by anybody but us, which cuts both ways.
Forty-four hours ended by an irreversible flood of our own making. The only permanent consequence in the notebook, and the entry defends it at length.
Thirty-eight hours in a station that grew outward in a spiral because demolishing anything felt like an admission. A game about the compound cost of never revising.
Twenty-nine hours and the lowest invented figure here. A place so complete and so pleasant that it left us almost nothing to add, which turns out to be a problem.
These are complete as records but not yet as entries. Their figures already feed both ledgers, so the counts on those pages include everything below.
| Notebook | Kind | Hours | First goal | Invented | Closed because |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terrace Works | Colony | 34 | 0:50 | 58% | Save lost, no backup |
| Salt Marsh | Survival | 27 | 4:00 | 39% | Bored at the mid-game wall |
| Cog And Beam | Physics | 23 | 0:20 | 77% | Exhausted the materials |
| Orchard Row | Farming | 19 | 1:30 | 44% | Bored, too forgiving |
| Drift Habitat | Station | 16 | 1:10 | 52% | Patch reset our layout |
| Pine Hollow | Wilderness | 11 | 3:35 | 31% | Bored, nothing at stake |
| Ridge Claim | Colony | 8 | 2:20 | 29% | Save corrupted at hour 8 |
| Chalk Flats | Physics | 4 | 0:15 | 84% | Materials ran out immediately |