Docs & Help

How to play

LAST WORDS is a single-player, procedurally generated vocabulary-currency strategy game. You are a scribe-deity tending the last library at the edge of a dying world. Every word you speak to act is permanently torn from your living vocabulary — for this run — and your interface erodes in step with what you've spent.

The four verbs

• SPEAK — cast the word's inscribed effect (attack an Eater, heal, open the final Gate). Power scales with tier.
• OFFER — sacrifice the word to repel the Eaters' tide; low-risk survival.
• ENGRAVE — set the word into a permanent Rune: a run-wide passive that outlives the word.
• BURY — spend word-value to restore an eroded map tile, uncovering landmarks and boons.

Tiers

Words come in three tiers: bronze (common scrap), silver (mid craft), and gold (rare — the only source of ritual and ending keys). The corpus is ~305 words, majority bronze, so scarcity does the pressuring.

The Fade, the Eaters, the Wall

Unspent words erode on their own (the Fade taxes hoarding); at two letters or fewer a word becomes its glyph; at zero it is consumed and logged forever. Every second night the Eaters advance; if they reach the library, the archive falls. Every ending lands on the Wall of Consumed Words.

Endings

Five deterministic endings: Sundown (a leaving), Resurrection (the world repaired), Gatekeeper (the Gate opened), Devouring (the tide reached the library), and Void (the dark quiet — reachable only deliberately). See About for the thesis behind them.

Getting unstuck

You always have a move: OFFER any word to pass the night. If your hand is empty and nothing more will come, the game will ask you to choose the void — that is a deliberate ending, not a soft-lock.

The isometric room view

Append ?view=iso to the play URL (https://last-words.pages.dev/?view=iso) to render the board as a candlelit dimetric room instead of the flat top-down map — the same board and the same rules, in projection. The room view wraps the board in a desktop HUD: a top bar, an Archivist sidebar with the turn counter, chapter nav (Chronicle / Objectives / Inventory / Grave) and an END TURN button, plus floating objective and turn-phase cards. It is an alternate lens for exploring the room; the default play screen is unchanged.

Seeds & persistence

#seed= — shared, reproducible runs

Append #seed=anything to the play URL — https://last-words.pages.dev/#seed=myrun — and the game starts a fresh run generated from that seed. The same seed always produces the same world: same word distribution, same map, same endgame. A seeded run is ephemeral: it never overwrites your live save until you actually progress.

Where your data lives

Everything is kept in this browser's localStorage, under two keys:

• lastwords.save — your live run, saved after every action. Refresh-safe; a finished run is cleared so it cannot be resumed.
• lastwords.wall — the Wall of Consumed Words: one record per ended run, capped at 400 (oldest dropped).

Privacy

There is no server, no analytics, no account, no network call. Your run and your Wall never leave this browser. Clearing your browser data erases them. The Wall is never aggregated anywhere.