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How to play

You keep the workshop of calculating reason through twenty-five stations, one for each text of the apparatus, from Hephaestus' self-moving tripods to Rossum's robots in 1920. The game ends at the threshold, where the apparatus ends: just before 1936. Its name is Leibniz's: ✦ ‘let us calculate’.

1. Stations. Each station is a text: a card from the logical line, the machine line, the counter-voices or the animated word. Many ask you to choose. Every card cites its passage ✦: the link opens it in the apparatus, in the original language and in English. Sometimes an incident follows, drawn from the same texts.
2. The five elements. Symbol, Combination, Number, Mechanism and Program, each from 0 to 10. The logical and machine stations raise them; you raise them further in the workshop. Every further step of an element costs more Insight than the last. Building needs Number 1; ordering the operations needs Mechanism 2 and Symbol 2.
3. Insight is your budget. Each station brings one or two; some choices bring more or cost some. Spend it as you like between the stations.
4. The counter-voices ask questions: Avicenna whether it knows that it is, Descartes whether it can reply to everything said in its presence, Lovelace whether it can originate anything. You may name a question and leave it open (it costs a point of Insight and counts in the accounting), or dismiss it and press on (Insight +2, but your hubris grows). One question, Poe's, can be answered, if you have built enough.
5. The animated word tells what happens to a made thing without a stop-word: the golem, the sorcerer's broom, the brazen head, the robots. Keep the stop-word (Control) in the workshop; the broom and the robots test it.
6. The accounting asks three questions: what became calculable, what stayed open, and what the stories warned. If every element stands at 5 or more at the threshold, the machine is complete on paper.

Prototype 0: every number is provisional and lives in deck.json. The cards cite the twenty-five modules of Calculemus: Philosophical predecessors of AI, in nine source languages.