A quiet year, and then the season finds out what the quiet year was worth.
You keep the land: the town, the grove, the ridge farm. Every year you have a short window to cut breaks, thin brush, and burn small patches — before you know where lightning will strike. Then the season plays out on its own terms. Ten years. The land remembers every cut, every burn, and every year you guessed wrong.
Prep phase. Tap hexes on the hillside and choose an action: cut a break (clears fuel, holds), thin brush (reduces fuel, cheap), or burn a small controlled patch (near-zero fuel, moderate cost, moderate risk to your nerves). You have a limited budget each year — spend it where you believe the danger is.
Season. Lightning strikes the hillside according to real weather — dry years draw more strikes, and strikes favor cells with heavier natural growth. Fire then spreads hex to hex: high fuel catches easier, wind pushes it further downwind, and any cell you cleared to zero simply will not carry it.
Autopsy. Every year, the game also quietly plays out the exact same lightning on a hillside where you did nothing at all — the ghost year. After the fire, you see both: gold hexes are ground your prep saved, ember hexes burned in both versions, and violet hexes are the rare case where your prepped hillside burned somewhere the ghost didn't — bad luck the map alone can't explain away.
Ten years. Burned ground regrows slowly. Breaks you don't maintain grow back too. The town, the grove, and the ridge farm can be lost — not as a fail state, just as what happened that year.
Tap a hex to apply the selected action. Tap it again with the same action to undo.