Bare Pavement
Clear the bus routes before seven.
What it is
One snowy night, 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., in six real minutes. You drive the plow. At seven the school buses roll, and the bus routes and Main Street have to be under 8 cm of snow on every part of every street, or a bus gets stuck. Snow keeps falling on streets you have already done.
The forecast on the card is exact: nothing falls that isn’t on it, and the temperature holds to it too. The blade throws a windrow across every driveway on your right, so a street plowed twice buries the same driveways twice. Bury one twice and someone comes out to the end of the drive and waves a shovel.
Salt keeps a plowed street bare while the snow falls, but only at −7 °C or warmer. Colder than that it does nothing, and the bus routes turn to ice that only sand makes passable. The hopper holds one load, salt or sand, and refills at the works yard.
Four nights make a winter: a Mild night and a Cold snap in Tamarack Bay, then Kestrel Crossing, a bigger town that a river splits in two, and Stonecrop Hill, whose steep streets need sand whatever the temperature. Each night opens when you clear the one before it, and your best on each is kept on this device.
How to play
- Pick the next turnSwipe
- Turn aroundSwipe back, or Turn around
- Blade up or downLift blade / Drop blade
- Salt or sandSpread salt, and the Next load chip
The truck drives itself; you only choose where it goes next, and an arrow over the corner shows the turn it will take. The spreader lays salt or sand behind the blade. The Next load chip picks what the next refill at the works yard will be.
On a desktop, the arrow keys pick the next turn, and the one pointing back turns the truck around. Space lifts and drops the blade, S spreads, L picks the next load, Enter starts the shift, and M turns the sound on and off.
What isn’t settled yet
Whether someone who has never seen it gets through the first night with no help. Nobody new has been watched trying yet.
On a device without WebGL 2, the night is played on a flat map from above instead of in 3D, and nobody comes out of the houses there.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover art was created with Grok (xAI).
Bare Pavement is original work by Launchway Games.