Firehold
You cannot put it out. You box it in, and the rule about where you are allowed to dig is the whole game.
What it is
A fire is moving across a hillside and you have crews with hand tools, and only a little hose. Tap ground and a crew walks there and scrapes it down to bare dirt. Fire cannot cross bare dirt.
The catch is where you are allowed to scrape: only next to something that already will not burn: burnt ground, rock inside the border, water, or dirt you cleared earlier. You cannot draw a line across the map and wait. You have to grow one from an anchor, which means committing to a side before the wind has told you which side mattered.
The wind decides afterwards
Every line you dig is a bet. The wind swings on a timer you can see, and it will sometimes hand you the flank you spent minutes digging and sometimes hand you the other one. Nothing is hidden from you and nothing is decided in your favour.
The second action is water
Tap Run hose and every square the lay can reach lights up. Tap one of them and the ground goes wet. Tap the button again to change your mind.
A lay starts at water and extends from ground you have already wet: the same anchor rule as digging, running off a different thing. It is there from the first shift, as long as there is water on the map, and you get six a shift.
The trade is the whole point: dirt is slow and permanent, water is fast and temporary. Wet ground dries out in twenty-six seconds. Lay it too early and it is gone before the fire arrives; lay it too late and you were digging when you should have been running hose.
A season, not an incident
Shifts get harder on things you can see (more cabins to protect, a bigger fire at the start, a longer walk in for the crews, faster wind swings), never on a multiplier working quietly against you. Clear a shift and you choose: rest the crews back to full, or call in a fourth crew and leave everyone else tired.
Crew condition carries between shifts. That is what stops each incident being a fresh start, and it is where the season gets its teeth. A loss ends it, unless you fight that same fire again.
How to play
- Send a crew to digTap
- Draw a longer lineDrag
- Run a hose layTap Run hose, then tap ground
Portrait, one thumb, no menus.
On a desktop, click and drag with the mouse; nothing is behind a key.
What isn't settled yet
The containment rule teaches itself and the season holds together. What has not been checked is whether someone who has never seen it understands, in their first shift, that they are boxing the fire in rather than fighting it, because every instinct from every other fire game says fight it.
Build Log
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Build 76
Wind swings were announced the instant they happened, but nothing new ignites in the first ten seconds and a swing changes roughly six percent of what burns before the next one arrives. The toast is gone. What carries it now are the cues that last: the arrow, the compass, and the forest leaning downwind.
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Build 62
The hose lay had seven passing tests and its button had never rendered once. A rename left a guard checking a name that no longer existed, so it read false forever and the control stayed hidden.
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Build 59
The season now ends properly rather than simply continuing. Difficulty ramps only on levers you can see: cabins, fires, wind swing, crew count. A hidden spread multiplier reads as the game cheating, and you cannot plan against a rule you cannot observe.
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Build 44
Cut the burnout and replaced it with a hose lay. Lighting fuel ahead of the fire was measured twice and lost twice: a careless backfire cost 20 to 30 points of win rate on four maps out of five, and an action whose worst case is starting a second fire is the wrong thing to hand a player in a game about stopping one. A hose lay has a floor: used badly it wastes time, it does not make things worse.
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Build 12
The fire started as one cell in the middle of the map while every anchor sat on the perimeter, so the only legal move was digging a long tendril in from the edge. It now arrives with a burn scar already behind it. Burnt ground was always a legal anchor; the fire simply never offered one.
Credits and licences
No third-party engine and no embedded typefaces: it uses whichever fonts your device already has. Cover drawn from the game’s own terrain, fire and crew code.
Firehold is original work by Launchway Games.