Downhill

The pool is every incorporated place in the United States with at least 5,000 people, by the Census Bureau's 2024 estimates: 5,337 of them, from New York down to Mendham, New Jersey. It is deliberately deep. You supply the names here rather than being shown them, so an obscure city is never put in front of anyone — it only has to be recognised if you think of it.

New England towns count. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine the town is the unit of government and often there is no incorporated place at all. Without them Brookline, Greenwich, Nantucket and 460 others would not exist.

Names resolve to the largest city that answers to them, so Portland is Oregon and Columbus is Ohio. Once a name has been used, using it again needs the state: Springfield, Missouri. There are eight Springfields in here and ten Franklins, and walking down them is a legitimate way to play, but you have to know the order rather than being handed it.

Twelve states are dealt from fifty-one, which is 158,753,389,900 possible hands. An earlier version put the whole map in play, and it was solvable: the best move was always the same greedy step, so the game was as many fixed lines as there were opening cities. Dealing the hand is what removes the line, because the ladder is assembled fresh each time.

One city per state. The decision every turn is not just which city but which state to spend: taking Seattle at 780,000 for a tight step also gives up Tacoma, Spokane and Bellevue for the rest of the hand.

Three lives. Naming a city that turns out to be bigger costs one. A name nobody answers to, a state you have already spent, or a city you have already named costs nothing — a typo should not end a run.

The starting city is drawn from the second to the twenty-fifth largest, so no two runs open the same way. A fixed start would make the first ten answers a recital of the population table rather than a decision.

Places that are not incorporated do not exist here, and the game says so rather than shrugging: Silver Spring, Metairie, East Los Angeles and most of the Las Vegas Strip are unincorporated, and the boroughs of New York are counties. Brooklyn on its own is read as the borough and refused, because the Brooklyn in the pool is in Ohio and has eleven thousand people.

There is no clock. The other games take their tension from time; this one takes it from the states left in your hand, and a timer would rush the only decision that matters.

Still in reach counts the cities that are both smaller than where you are and in a state you are still holding. Spending California takes four hundred of them out of play at once.

Your best run is kept in this browser and nowhere else.