A few minutes a day
You bank one action every 10 minutes up to 50, so a full tank is roughly 8.3 hours of not playing. Check in at lunch, spend it, come back after dinner to a full one.
The Drill is the training simulation for Suburban Dead — the main game,
The Cordon, is one persistent shared Fenwick and opens when the first wave fills.
All the ways in ▸
The shape of it
Seven nights, and each one is bigger
You arrive with nothing on an ordinary wet afternoon. You have until dusk to find a building, board it up and get whatever is out there inside it. Then the first night comes, and it is small. The seventh is not — and it is a week away, on the same evening of your week, at the same hour.
Nothing skips a night
No pause, no fast-forward, not even for the host. Dusk is 20:00 and the clock is the real one. Whatever you left unfinished, you meet at dusk.
The morning explains itself
Every dawn files a report: how many came, how many attempts on the barricades, how many got in, and who is not at breakfast. Losing tells you exactly why.
Plate arcade · Ellery Shopping Mall
Designated holds
Nobody hands you a building
You pick one and you take it. Claiming boards the room you are standing in to level 4, every other room in the building to 2, shuts every door and makes the place a safehouse.
Then you learn the thing everyone learns once: every section has its own barricade. A mall is six rooms and six ways in. Board one to the roof and leave the rest, and the dead simply walk in somewhere else — which is not a story about the wave. It is a story about the neighbours.
How claiming works ▸
Plate junkyard · northern approach
Nightly threat assessment
They know where the people are
You are told what is coming. The forecast gives you the count and the compass face before dusk, free, and it is accurate. Knowing does not help as much as you would like.
All night, every tick, every one of them walks at whichever hold is nearest to it. Not the biggest. Not the loudest. The nearest. A second building on the far side of the district is not a decoy — it is a second front.
Read the threat assessment ▸
Plate chapel · occupied, twelve at last count
Civilian welfare
The people you bring home fight for you
Eight to ten civilians are scattered through the district when a run starts — one to a building, indoors, frightened. They will not scavenge and they cannot barricade. Finding them is play. Walking them home at five in the afternoon is very much play.
Get one back and you can post them at a wall with a role and a trigger, and the night spends their action points instead of yours. A garrison, not a turret.
Recruiting and posting ▸Terms of extraction
Two ways to be counted
Whoever hosts the run picks one thing for it to be about, before anyone takes a step. It is the only thing the last morning counts.
Survive
Be alive when the convoy comes. Nothing else is asked of you.
Claim anywhere, or nowhere. The score is players still standing — and a seat, not a body: dying and rolling a new survivor costs the group nothing. Six people who each died twice are graded six of six.
The eighth morning grades the share you brought out
- Sanctuary100%+
- Holdfast70%+
- Survivors40%+
- Pyrrhic extractionabove zero
- Holdfast lostnothing
Seven evenings, starting with tonight's
Host a run and you get a code to send round, or join one already standing. No account, no download. The clock begins the moment it is hosted — so host in the morning and give everybody a day to dig in before the first one.
Free · in your browser · a few minutes a day for a week