AMERICAN
COLLAPSE

A crisis hits. What does your family do?

A survival strategy game about getting one family through three years of a country coming apart. The solo game is free in your browser right now. No download, no account.

Play free in your browser Pass & Play with friends

The boxed edition is a Founder’s Edition prototype, now in playtesting. Get playtest invites

Box art for the boxed edition: a family of four seen from behind on a highway overpass at dusk, one holding a lantern and one a pair of binoculars, looking over a jammed highway and a city with distant firesBox in development
Playable now
Screenshot of the free solo game in a browser: round 1 of 12, the family's stores of water, food, fuel, ammo, medicine, and trade goods, the crisis card Dead Battery, and buttons to choose an action and a response

Play it tonight, free

The browser game is a digital adaptation of the board game. It deals the same hundred crisis cards and runs a simplified version of the rules, streamlined for one screen. Each round you get a crisis, your family’s stores, and one decision: what to do, and how to answer the crisis. It is a work in progress.

Screenshot of the solo game: the round, season, and DEFCON at the top; six resource counters; the crisis card Dead Battery with its effect, optional add-on, reward, and the cost of ignoring it; then the action buttons Work, Bank, Fortify, Clear threat, and Restore, and the responses Face it, Ignore, and Sacrifice
Round one of a solo game, as it looks in a desktop browser today.

  • Solo vs. The Regime

    Live

    Your family against an automated rival that profits from the collapse. Twelve rounds, three difficulties, four victory paths.

    Play solo

  • Pass & Play

    Live

    Two to six families on one phone or laptop. A hand-off screen keeps everyone's stores and choices private.

    Start a table

  • Online with private links

    Coming soon

    Send each player a private link and take turns on your own time. Not open yet; join the list to hear when it is.

    Get notified

  • Table companion

    Live

    For playtest and print-and-play tables: draw crises, track DEFCON and the seasons, and run the three-minute timer from a phone.

    Open companion

Solo and online games use four of the five victory paths. Community needs a full table.

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”
Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906

The grid is down, the shelves are bare, and the country has split into six regions that each have something the others need. Every round brings a crisis and a choice: face it, take the fallout, or make a sacrifice to get through. Trade, ally, scavenge, or betray. The choices are yours. So are the consequences.

One continuous painted horizon across the six regions: travelers in a redwood forest, a lodge in snowy mountains, a cracked desert highway, a grain elevator and farmhouse, a flooded bayou with small boats, and a port city with cranes

A hundred crises

Seventy-five grounded in real preparedness. Twenty-five that go off the map.

Boil-water notices, cascading grid failures, a polar vortex that will not move, pharmacies sold out by noon, a bridge that is not there anymore. The Easy, Moderate, and Hard tiers come from real preparedness thinking. The Extreme tier is speculative fiction on purpose, for the years when nothing goes to plan.

Easy crisis card, Tainted Tap: the town water is contaminated; a father filters water at the kitchen sink while his son watches
Moderate crisis card, The Only Bridge: a collapsed truss bridge in a river at dusk, with a family and their truck stranded on the bank
Hard crisis card, The Swarm: a dark swarm and smoke roll over a farm as people run for cover
Extreme crisis card, The Granary Falls: engineered weevils have ruined the grain; two people with a lantern walk away from smoking grain silos
Survivor card: Lucy Okafor, age 8, holding a sock puppet. Trait: Keeps Us Laughing
Equipment card: Water Filter, a steel gravity filter beside a jar and a glass of clean water

Swipe through the cards.

A nation in six pieces

The prototype board is a painted map of the fractured United States: six regions, thirty resource sites, and twelve safe havens. No region has everything it needs, so every route is a trade lane and a risk.

The prototype board: a dark map of the United States split into six colored regions, with resource sites, safe havens, highways and rail lines, a DEFCON track from 5 to 1, a twelve-season wheel, and a three-card mission market
Prototype board art. Layout and art will change before print. Swipe to pan.Open the full-size board
  • A weathered cabin among burned trees in the Pacific Northwest, a crack splitting the ground in front; a man and a child stand outside while a woman watches from a lit window

    Pacific Wasteland

    Quakes and wildfire

    Rich in water, no ammo sites

  • A timber cabin built into a snowy cliff, firewood under a lean-to, barrels and fenced garden beds, one figure in the lit window

    Mountain Stronghold

    Avalanches and long winters

    Rich in ammo, no fuel sites

  • An adobe house in a dust storm below desert mesas; a man with a lantern at the door, barrels and firewood stacked by the wall

    Desert Confederation

    Drought and dust storms

    Rich in fuel, no medical sites

  • A weathered farmhouse with boarded windows under storm clouds, a fenced garden in front and a collapsed barn behind; a figure in the lit upstairs window

    Heartland Territories

    Tornadoes and failed harvests

    Rich in food, no medical or ammo sites

  • A house raised on stilts behind sandbags in floodwater, snapped power poles and storm debris around it, a lantern in the window

    Gulf Disaster Zone

    Hurricanes and floods

    Rich in fuel, no food sites

  • A boarded-up brick building in a ruined city behind concrete barriers, a lantern in one window; two adults and a child stand in the yard

    Eastern Seaboard

    Crowded ruins and failing infrastructure

    Rich in medicine, no fuel sites

One round. Six phases. Three minutes to decide.

At the table, everyone plans in secret behind a screen. Then a crisis lands and the three-minute timer starts. Twelve rounds carry you across three years while the DEFCON track, the nation’s stability, slides toward collapse. The browser game runs these phases for you and asks for one decision per round.

DEFCON track5 is stable, 1 is freefall. Hit 0 and every family loses.

  1. Dawn

    Assign your family in secret.

  2. Scenario

    Draw a crisis. Three minutes on the clock.

  3. Actions

    Scavenge, guard, work, trade, fight.

  4. Crisis

    The nation lurches and DEFCON shifts.

  5. Consumption

    Feed and water everyone, or lose them.

  6. Night

    Raiders come, alliances form, the season turns.

Five ways to win, or none at all

You pick a path at the start. Exact targets are shown in each game and may change as playtesting tunes the balance.

Survival
Keep your family alive to the end of the third year.
Restoration
Complete restoration missions and pull the nation back to DEFCON 5.
Dominance
Take and hold eight resource sites.
Escape
Pay into an Escape Fund until you can buy passage out.
Community
Build an alliance that spans the map. Boxed game only: it needs a full table.

The boxed edition is in development

Everything on this page comes from a Founder’s Edition prototype. The browser game shows you the decisions. The box is about the table: three-minute arguments, responses revealed all at once, named family members you will hate to lose, and alliances you have to look someone in the eye to break.

It is in playtesting now, and the numbers below are design targets until real groups have played it.

Get a playtest invite
Status
Founder's Edition prototype, in playtesting
Players
2 to 6, plus a solo mode
Play time
About 2 to 3 hours (target, not yet timed at outside tables)
Ages
14 and up (target)
Ways to play
Competitive, cooperative Family Mode, and a hidden-traitor variant
Price and release
Not set yet. The list hears first.

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