Saw You

The wood-paneled library that makes you lower your voice. the courtroom wall, or the wainscoting in an old dining room. 

Somebody built all of that, and it wasn't pieced together on site with a nail gun: it was measured off the real walls, built in a workshop to the sixteenth of an inch, and brought in on a truck. If the shop read one corner wrong, the whole room comes back.

That trade is called architectural millwork. It still exists in your town, and it is losing.

Across town is a building where computer-run machines turn out a piece of trim every ninety seconds, eight hundred a day, cut from files by people who never touch the wood. The product is cheaper. The product is fine. Nobody has ever asked who cut it.

That is the competition, and it does not even know your shop exists.

The Game

You spent fifteen years keeping machines like those running. Then your father's old partner, seventy and worn out, wrote to say he was selling the family shop to the machine outfit. Half of it still belongs to your family.

You came home and made him a deal: one busy season, eight weeks, at a bench. Prove the old way can still pay its own rent, or sign.

Each week you get five bench hours for the joints. You sight boards for defects the way you'd aim a rifle. You read out-of-square corners from a bevel gauge and set the saw until no light shows under the blade. You cut the corner in two halves that have to agree with each other, and on Friday, everything you shipped either holds in somebody's house or comes back on the truck with your name on it.

Everything costs minutes. Looking costs minutes. Measuring costs minutes. Care costs minutes, and the order is due Friday whether you spent them or not.

The shop already knows what rushing costs, and nobody in it will ever tell you to hurry.

That silence is the whole game.

The skill is your eye, and the game never shows it to you.

There is no skill bar. No number goes up. You just start seeing things you could not see in week one: a bow in a board, a quarter degree of light under a blade, the difference between a joint that is tight and one that is telling on you.

When it happens, you will know, because the work will tell you.

You can rent the fast machine, and it is genuinely good. Whether that saves your season or ends the trade in your own hands depends on what happens to your eye while the machine does the cutting.

The details.

• Plays in your browser. Mouse or touch. No install.
• An eight-week season with four endings - decided by what kind of worker you became.
• Every corner graded the way the trade grades: from open to dead tight.
• Drawn and written to trade honesty: the geometry on screen is the real geometry of the cut.
• The season saves every Monday. Walk away and come back.
• A full season runs about an hour. Sound on if you can.

This is a public beta (v0.13). If a corner misbehaves, the "Share the receipts" button at the end of a season copies your numbers. Paste them in the comments with what happened and what you expected.

What holds true?