SilkWard

SilkWard is a turn-based puzzle game about a caravan leader tracing a lost sibling along the Silk Road. It is the first of the three games this studio makes, and the one that set the rule the other two follow.

One screen, one step each

Every level is a single-screen isometric diorama — a stretch of road, a caravanserai courtyard, a mountain pass — drawn small enough to hold in your head all at once. There is no camera to pan and nothing hidden off the edge. What you can see is what there is.

You take one step. Then every other figure on the board takes one step. That is the whole clock. Nothing moves while you are thinking, nothing is on a timer, and stepping back out of a mistake costs one tap rather than a run.

The opponent cannot surprise you

No dice are rolled anywhere in SilkWard, and this is the part worth being precise about: it is not that the randomness is mild, it is that there is none. Replay a level and make the same moves and the same things happen, in the same order.

That turns every failure into information. A route that got cut is a route you misread, and reading it again is the way through. Puzzle games that hide a percentage behind an attack teach you to retry; this one teaches you to look again.

The figures that share the board with you follow rules you can watch and learn. None of them has a rule you cannot see.

Three acts

The three acts are a difficulty ramp and a story at the same time. The first teaches the road — how the step economy works, what the terrain does, which figures follow and which wait. The second complicates it with routes that cross and figures whose rules interact. The third adds tolls and rules for moving the caravan together on top of everything the first two taught, and asks you to be exact.

Where it runs

SilkWard opens in a browser. There is no installer, no launcher and no account; the address is the whole of getting in. iOS and Android builds are coming soon, running the same engine — not a separate mobile edition, the same game in a second window. Until then it plays in your phone’s browser too.

The web build is statically exported and there is no server behind it, because there is nothing for a server to do. Which means there is no connection to drop, no outage to wait out and no account for anyone to close.

What it does not do

Nothing is collected. No accounts, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports — not anonymised, absent. Your save, your progress and your settings sit on your own device and are deleted when you clear your browser data or uninstall the app.

There is nothing to sell you either: no ads, no subscription, no season, no daily login reward. The studio page explains why the whole catalogue is shaped this way, and the privacy page states the claim in the terms it can be checked in.