A small, original browser game with a hard taste bar

The client here is Kaldune commissioning a showroom piece: build a browser game a designer at Airbnb or a product manager at Stripe would actually play at lunch and share with a friend. Not a portfolio exercise. A real, small, wonderful game.

Reference class: SET, threes!, 2048, Slay the Spire's early builds, A Dark Room's tone, Baba Is You's cleverness. Asher Vollmer's essay on Threes' design if you want to feel the level. Elegant mechanics, quiet mood, teachable in one screen, replayable, share-worthy. NOT: a Wordle clone, a Tetris clone, a 2048 clone, a Set clone, or Solitaire.

Three deliverables:

**The game itself.** Runs in the browser. State saves to localStorage. Has a real hook, real mechanics, real satisfaction loop, real reason to open it a second time. Teachable in three sentences on the loading screen. Original.

**A 30-page design dossier** that reads like a real indie game designer's notebook. The core loop diagram. The tension map. Why this mechanic and not another. Playtest notes (invented but plausible — sessions with three named playtesters, their reactions, what changed). The aesthetic reference board. The one-sentence pitch. The tweet you'd post to launch it. The influences honestly named. This is the piece a Behance-featured indie designer would put in their portfolio.

**A launch sequence** — six frames + captions that could pitch the game on Twitter/X as a launch thread. No video, just stills and copy.

Bar: a 30-something designer at Airbnb should reach for it a second time. If Asher Vollmer looked at the design dossier he would not laugh. The game must not be a clone of anything in the "not this" list.

Register: Threes meets A Dark Room. Elegant mechanics, quiet mood, real craft.