The AI Buildout Trail

How to play

The goal

Build 200 units of compute in 20 rounds — 2026 to 2037 — and still be able to defend how you did it. Arriving is the easy half.

A round is three decisions

1. How hard do you push? Careful (+10 compute, $35M, the town stays with you) · Steady (+15, $60M, a fair trade on every front) · Breakneck (+23, $100M, burns water, power, goodwill and people). Careful alone will not get you to 200 in 20 rounds. That is the squeeze the whole game runs on.
2. Where does the money go? Three options a round, always including something for your weakest stat. Fix the watershed, buy clean power, fund an outside red team, hire ahead of the crunch — or take on debt, or spend nothing.
3. Something happens. A drought, a protest, a regulator, an offer you shouldn't take. Thirty-five events, never repeating, weighted toward whatever you have been neglecting. At fixed compute thresholds you hit a landmark instead — a bigger decision with a longer shadow.

What you're carrying

All five run 0–100, and any one of them hitting zero ends the run on the spot. You also carry capital, debt and compute — compute is the distance bar, and it earns revenue, more of it when trust is high.

What counts as winning

You need all four at once. There is no partial credit. Three of four is the normal outcome — it gets you a survival ending that names the pillar you dropped and what it cost. All four, plus a team still standing, is the only route to THE LONG FUTURE, and it is one of twelve endings.

The ideal

Careful and steady pace. Money into the weakest thing rather than the most exciting thing. Debt kept low enough that it never compounds against you. Play like that and the good ending is reliable, not lucky — which is the argument the game exists to make.

The less ideal

• Race and the town says no before you finish.
• Borrow your way there and the money runs out.
• Only protect safety, or only the environment, and time runs out at round 20.
• Cut four corners and ETHICAL fails even with alignment at 100 and trust at 99 — the scorecard will name all four decisions and the round you made each one.
• Arrive first having dropped two pillars and you get a banner and a failure, which is the ending most players see the first time.

Watch for two things

A dividend means a pillar got high enough to pay you back, and the screen names which one.

A margin call fires once at debt over $700M or capital under −$250M, and it rescues you by force-selling compute — it costs you the thing you are racing for. Bankruptcy is −$500M.