No tutorial videos. No energy bar to refill with your wallet. Here's how it works.
The game is six words along the top. today is what there is to do: the scene, one thing to press, the feed, and the forecast and your purse folded underneath. you is your runner: the sheet, standing, kit and history, plus the job, standing orders and holiday. 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 your login, notifications, and retiring a runner. Anything that needs explaining is in help.
You have one runner at a time. You can retire them and start again, but you can't run two. Their stats are rolled on top of the class you pick. They get a job, and a look you're dealt and can change one piece at a time. You don't control the face. It shows how they actually feel. Injured looks injured. The night before a race looks nervous.
The look is settled when you register, so take a minute over it. After that, only kit changes it: a hat you earn, or things you buy that the sprite wears, like shoes, a singlet or a visor.
One day in the game is one real day. A session takes its real length to finish. A drill is done inside the hour. A long run takes hours. You start it, get on with your life, and a ping tells you how it went.
You get one session a day to begin with. A second, in the afternoon, opens at level 5. A demanding job can still take it on a weekday.
Every morning your runner wakes and pings you. Their job sets the hour, not you. That ping starts the day.
Sessions build the seven qualities that matter on trail: climbing, descending, endurance, race IQ, a stomach that holds, heat tolerance and confidence. Sessions, ground and races add load, and it comes off a little at a time whenever you're not out running. Past the red zone on the load bar, a hard effort can injure you. Condition goes fresh, niggle, strained, injured, and you're warned before every step down.
Time away costs fitness. Skip a few days and not much happens. Skip a month and you'll have fitness to win back. Fitness you've pushed well above where your class started drops faster than the rest, so the top of a career needs keeping up. It never drops below the runner you started as, so nothing is ever wiped.
Real Wellington trails, sent in by the people who run them. Each piece of ground is held by whoever has the fastest recorded time on it. You can go for one whenever you're willing to take on the load, and it counts as that day's training. Each piece of ground says which stats it builds.
The field going for it is a population of simulated locals, each 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. Ground 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 club night 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, as a branching story in a terminal. Your stats decide which choices you get. Your form on the day counts, and so does the field. Your place comes from the same model that timed everyone else, not from a dice roll.
Every race goes at the gun whether you're watching or not, and places are final when the last runner is home. Set a plan beforehand and it makes any call you miss, at a cost in time. Being there is worth time, and we tell you how much.
Three Tararua routes have a mark on them instead: Jumbo–Holdsworth, the Southern Crossing, and the S–K at 74 kilometres. They're free, they take hours, and you go whenever you like. Being broke is no reason not to.
You play them like a race, except each call unlocks when the clock reaches the ground it's on, so the next one can be hours away. You declare the S–K the day before. It starts at your wake hour the next morning, and tomorrow's real forecast is on the board when you decide. Nothing stops you going out into bad weather. It just costs you.
Take on a route beyond your experience and the day can end with a LandSAR helicopter. The board won't tell you which route that is.
One region so far, Wellington. The region screen opens with the people. Most of the runners on those hills are simulated and a few are people, 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. They aren't told. If they watch you back, you're mates, and the two of you share the top of the screen.
Under that is the ladder. Everybody is ranked on ability into four groups of fixed size, Tops down to Valley. Promotion and relegation happen when the real season turns, not while you're at work. Every name opens 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. The ladder doesn't ping you when you drop a place. If you're near the bottom of your group 14 days before the season turns, you get one warning.
Shoes clock up kilometres and wear smooth. Poles fatigue until they snap. The head torch runs on batteries, and gels get eaten. On ground, a route or a race, road shoes on wet rock cost you time, and the dark costs more without a light. Training sessions don't charge for either. Kit only ever removes a penalty. Nothing in the shop makes you faster than your legs. You're always warned before something fails.
Some kit is compulsory. The mountain routes and the longer races publish a compulsory kit list, the way real races do. 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. The demanding ones take the weekday afternoon session and add stress. A student trains flat out on instant noodles. A nurse earns properly and has to manage the load. You can change job every 30 days, free.
Living costs come off the wage before it reaches the purse: rent, power and the supermarket. What's left buys gear, gels, race entries, a look, and a massage or a physio when a week has gone badly. It never buys fitness or a result, and it can't fix a strain or an injury. Those heal with time.
Standing orders are optional. Set a focus and a risk level, and a session you don't start runs itself. It's always a bit worse than showing up, and it never trains your runner into an injury. Like all automation here, it's free. Don't open the game for more than 4 days and the orders stop, and your runner starts spending the purse on other things.
If you're actually going away, book a holiday. You get 4 weeks a year, booked ahead. Load and stress are cleared on the first morning, and the fitness slide runs at half pace. It doesn't pause the world, because nothing does, and it doesn't protect your division. Your runner spends it on a towel. Real runners take an off-season and come back rested and a little slower, and so does yours.
The game installs on your phone as an app and reaches you by push: the morning wake, ground lost, race eve, a warning worth hearing. Pings arrive when things happen, night or day. You choose which ones you get.
It's still being built, and things will change under you. Help goes into more detail than this page and lists the rules we hold ourselves to, so you can hold us to them when something goes sideways.