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, not hoses. 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, 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 four crew-minutes on 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, more fires, 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 another 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. One loss ends it.
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.
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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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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Renamed to Firehold. The old name described the subject; this one describes the job.
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Cut the burnout and replaced it with a hose lay. Lighting fuel ahead of the fire failed its own kill criterion 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.
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 composited from a base image created with Grok (xAI).
Firehold is original work by Launchway Games.