Ashgate Apothecary

Two builds, and one question

You are the only physician in a town where none of the diseases exist. Nothing that comes through the door has a name you could look up. You work each one out from what it does to them, where it has settled, how it arrived, and the time it keeps.

Everything here is a prototype. Type is doing all the work — there is no art, no sound, and no saving.

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Start here

10 minutes

The Trial

Twenty patients. No clock, no money, no shop — every instrument is free and you may take as long as you like over anybody. Just the puzzle, with everything else stripped away.

Play the trial → 25 minutes

The Shop

Six days of running the place. Twelve half-hours a day and a patient takes one of them just to be seen, so you cannot test everything. Splinters and teeth between the real cases. Name what you cure. When you are wrong, they come back.

Play the season →

Both work on a phone. Nothing is saved — reloading starts a new one.

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What we're actually asking

We can already show the puzzles are solvable, that the difficulty holds across a career, and that the outbreak is findable in time. None of that tells us whether any of it is enjoyable. That's the only thing we need from you.

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If you play the trial

1. It quietly assigns you one of two versions when the page loads. Don't compare notes with anyone before you play — half the point is that you don't know which you got.
2. At twenty patients it stops and asks whether you want another. Answer honestly. That choice is the single most useful number here.
3. Press Stop here when you're done and send back the block of text on the results screen.

To force a version: /trial/?arm=a or /trial/?arm=b