7ABCs
Moon 1 · EchoD12
Cultural
Aug 19 – 22
Whose songs did we keep?
Season One · A preferred reality game
August 17 to September 22. Eight moons, one capital each, ending at the equinox. Collect a card, do one forty-minute block, send a scroll — that is the whole game. Free to play, from anywhere. The entire calendar is on this page before you start, including the part where we talk about money.
37 days · 8 moons · Families play together · No cost, no account for under-13s
In 2007 a game called World Without Oil asked about nineteen hundred people to imagine an oil shock and then document their own lives inside it. One real day played one story week. The players' stories were the game — around fifteen hundred of them — and the best were woven into the official record each night. Its slogan was play it before you live it.
Season One borrows the method and inverts the mood. That game rehearsed a future people feared. This one rehearses a future we would prefer.
Last September, in the story, the Big One hit Cascadia. Season One is set one year later. Nobody is surviving a disaster here — you are playing the part that comes after, when people work out what a place is actually made of. There turn out to be eight answers, and the season spends four days on each.
You do not need to have played anything before. You do not need to know the lore. You need forty minutes, some days, and a willingness to send us what happened.
Three verbs. That is genuinely all of it — everything further down this page is scaffolding for the grown-ups.
01
Find a card. Twenty-four of them are public places around Seattle, each lettered and each wanting a particular hour of the day. Claim one from anywhere in the world, or stand in the place and claim it there.
Takes as long as getting there
02
Do one forty-minute block in whichever guild the current moon belongs to. One block. Not a day, not a course, not a curriculum. Forty minutes with a person you love.
40 minutes
03
Send what happened — a photo, a voice note, a drawing, three sentences. Scrolls are read every evening and the strongest enter the season's permanent record.
2 minutes, by phone
Seven of the eight guilds happen off a screen. A scroll can be a voice note. No child needs a keyboard to play this.
Thirty-seven days breaks into two days of opening, thirty-two days of play, and three days of writing it all down. The thirty-two are eight capitals in sequence — and the sequence is the point.
Mon Aug 17 – Tue Aug 18
The season begins in public, in Seattle. Come if you can get there; the game starts for everyone either way.
Aug 19 – 22
Whose songs did we keep?
Aug 23 – 26
What is still alive here?
Aug 27 – 30
What can we make with our hands?
Aug 31 – Sep 3
Where have we actually been?
Sep 4 – 7
What do we owe the ground?
Sep 8 – 11
Who would open their door to us?
Sep 12 – 15
What can we teach now?
Sep 16 – 19
What is this worth, and to whom?
Sun Sep 20 – Tue Sep 22
One year to the day since the quake. Every scroll worth keeping is read into the record, and the season closes at the equinox.
Our own research puts financial capital eighth of eight — the last kind of wealth to appear, never the first. Cultures that skip the other seven produce extraction rather than wealth. So the season spends thirty-two days on the other seven capitals, and only in the last four days do we talk about what any of it is worth, what September looks like, and what we would ever charge for. You can read that here before you start, which is the only honest way to do it.
The Wheel of the Day splits the waking hours into twenty-four forty-minute blocks, A through X, where the angle around the wheel is the colour is the time. Every place-card carries a letter — so the card tells you when it wants to be visited.
Card G is red and wants eight in the morning. Card S is cyan and wants four in the afternoon. Collect both and you have learned the wheel without being taught it.
Eight of twenty-four, published now. The rest land before Moon 3. Every one of them is free, public, and reachable by bus — because a card that costs money to reach is not a card, it is a bill.
If you run a shop, a studio, a farm stand, or a practice in Seattle, you can become a card. Pick your best hour, get your letter, and families collect you — with a welcome gift if you want one, and a quest if you want more than that. There is no fee to be a partner in Season One. Every business that signs on between now and the equinox gets announced in the story as an event, because a season that visibly grows is better than one that launched complete. Write to [email protected].
That is not a consolation prize and there is no asterisk on it. It is the honest ceiling of what any screen can give you, and we would rather print it than pretend.
Claim it from anywhereRemote, any timezone, any day
1 – 9
Stand in the place and claim itThe card's own hour, its own light
1 – 9
Collect it at a gathering, in personFace to face, with other families
10
Attainment is roll divided by maximum. Nine of ten is ninety percent of any petal — a complete, respectable, finished season. The last tenth is the part a screen structurally cannot deliver, so it costs showing up, and the only place to get it is one of the gatherings in the first two weeks. That is also why those gatherings exist: they are not marketing with a game attached, they are the only door to face ten in the whole season.
At the close of each moon we reveal ten wildcards, faces one through ten. Every family that played that moon drafts one.
Turn order is inverted. Whoever scrolled least that moon picks first.
The one rule we would defend hardest
It kills runaway leaders. It makes a light week non-punishing — the family that managed one block all moon gets the best card on the table. It taxes enthusiasm rather than quiet, which is the only fair direction for that tax to run. And it means there is no top player of Season One and there will not be one; the only thing worth finishing is a Full Lotus, which is all eight guilds touched, and the calendar hands you that if you do one block per moon.
Count this moon's work toward a different guild.
Hand your whole moon to another family.
Call someone into your scroll. Something answers, in canon.
Force a branch in the season's story. We have to honour it.
Open a partner's quest for every player, not just you.
Ask a previous moon's question again, knowing what you know now.
Canonise a scroll permanently. Nobody can remove it afterward, including us.
Write your own effect. The council rules on it at the next council.
Face ten sits in every deck. If nobody was physically present that moon, it stays face down and burns. Eight moons, eight drafted cards — by the equinox your family holds a hand that shapes how your season ends.
There is nothing to pay and nothing to install. We will send you the opening scroll, the first cards, and where to send what happens. Two minutes.
Cody Lestelle & HannahSeattle · we built this and we play it
We built the eight guilds, the Wheel of the Day, and the research they sit on, and we run this with our own kids in it. Gatherings always have at least two of us on them — one person cannot facilitate a room and play in it at the same time.
Season One is the first time any of this has been run in public. It will be rough in places. That is what a first season is for, and the whole record will be readable afterward — including the parts that did not work.