The wreck
Leaderboard
- Loading…
About Castaway
Castaway is a free turn-based survival game about being stranded somewhere that does not want you to leave. There is no reflex test in it and nothing moves until you do. You have a seven-by-seven island under fog, a wrecked ship on the south shore, and three pieces of an engine scattered somewhere inland. Every step costs a turn and a ration; every new tile puts a situation in front of you and two or three ways to handle it, none of them free.
What makes it different from the usual explore-and-loot game is the compass. It points at the nearest engine part you have not found yet, which sounds like it solves the game — except that its accuracy is tied to your nerve, and the island drains nerve from you every turn, faster the deeper inland you go. The needle does not flicker — it drifts, sitting off true by up to a point or two and wandering slowly, so a wrong reading stays wrong in the same direction long enough to mislead you properly. You set out able to read it perfectly. By the time you are carrying all three parts and looking for the beach again, you are following a needle you have good reason not to trust — and resting or drinking a tonic visibly pulls it back toward true.
That turns nerve from a number in the corner into the thing you are actually managing. Prying the gemstone out of the shrine pays 150 gold and costs you 25 nerve, which is to say it pays 150 gold and makes the rest of the map harder to find. Almost every decision in the game is that trade in some form.
How to play
- Move: tap or click any tile next to you. Costs 1 turn and 1 ration. With no rations left, a step costs 8 health instead.
- Resolve: arriving somewhere new triggers a situation. Read it, pick an option. Some options are gated on rations, gold or nerve.
- Collect: the three engine parts are on ruins or volcano tiles, always well inland and well apart.
- Escape: carry all three back to the wreck (⚓) on the south shore. That is the win.
- Make camp to trade a turn and 2 rations for 12 health and 8 nerve. The merchant camp (⚑) sells bandages, meat, tonic, a spyglass and a bone charm.
- Scoring: escaping is 5,000, plus 20 per health, 15 per nerve, 25 per ration and 5 per gold you still hold, minus 50 for every turn you took. Hard multiplies the lot by 1.2. Losing still banks a smaller score for the parts you found.
Where it comes from
Castaway is an original game, not a remake of a particular title, but it is openly built out of a tradition: the choose-your-route survival games and text-and-table adventures that run on a resource clock — The Oregon Trail above all, and the modern strand of expedition roguelikes like FTL and Sunless Sea that made the branching event card into a genre of its own. From those it takes the shape of a run: a map, a countdown, a hand of resources, and a series of small written dilemmas that spend them.
The compass is the part that is ours. Tying navigation accuracy to a sanity stat means the game gets harder to read as it goes rather than simply harder to survive, and it gives a losing run a very particular flavour — you rarely die because something beat you, you die because you could no longer tell where you were going. Every tile, situation, number and line of text in the game was written from scratch for it.
Tips & strategy
- Nerve is navigation. At full nerve the needle is exact. Below about 65 it drifts a point off true, below about 20 it can sit two points off — 90°. Spending a turn and two rations at camp is often cheaper than the wasted moves a drifted needle costs you.
- The beach is the safe road. Coastal tiles drain 1 nerve a turn; the volcano drains 4. A longer route around the edge can genuinely beat a short one through the middle.
- Take the food option early, the gold option late. Rations are the clock; gold is only worth 5 points each and cannot be eaten. Grab the gemstone on the way home, not on the way out.
- Turns are worth 50 points each. An option that costs an extra turn needs to pay for itself. "Wait for it to cool" is usually the wrong answer if you are on a good run.
- Buy the spyglass if you are lost. Five revealed tiles for 80 gold is a bargain when your nerve has gone and the needle is guessing.
- Know when to give up. A finished run banks points for the parts you found. A run you abandon by closing the tab banks nothing.
FAQ
Is Castaway free? Yes — free to play in your browser, supported by ads, with no purchases.
Do I need an account? No. You only enter a display name when submitting a score to the leaderboard.
Does it work on mobile? Yes. It is all tapping — no reflexes, no dragging, and it plays fine one-handed in portrait.
How long is a run? Roughly eight to twelve minutes. There is no time pressure between turns; the only clock is the turn count.
Can I close the tab and come back? Yes. The run lives on the server and resumes where you left it.
Is the map the same every time? No. The terrain, the situations and the location of all three engine parts are generated fresh for every run.
Why is the compass wrong? Because your nerve has dropped. At full nerve it is never wrong. As nerve falls the needle drifts off true — by one point, then at worst two — and it wanders slowly rather than jumping about, so it stays readable. It never points the opposite way, so a reading is always worth something. Rest or drink a tonic and it swings back.