Jeepnits · in development
Tongits,
pero roguelike.
- The cards
- are Tongits.
- The jeep
- is the run.
- The terminal
- is the wall.
- The operator
- is the clock.
A solo roguelike built on Tongits and shaped like a jeepney route. This is not a jeepney theme painted onto a card game — the route structure is the game structure.
A run is a week of driving.
Stop
Passengers board, passengers leave. You play a hand.
Trip
Four stops, terminal to terminal. One biyahe.
Day
Three trips, then you settle up and get judged.
Run
Five or six days, and a boundary that keeps rising.
“Boundary” is the scariest word in the game.
In the real trade, the boundary is what a driver owes the operator at the end of a day — before a single peso of what he earned is his. Make it and the day was yours. Miss it and you are carrying the shortfall into tomorrow, on top of tomorrow’s.
That is the whole tension of the game, and it is the part most players outside the Philippines have never heard of. It is also why the loop is not a difficulty curve someone designed — it is a number that goes up while you are trying to keep pace with it.
Vocabulary
- Boundary
- What you owe the operator before anything you earn is yours.
- Biyahe
- One run of the route, terminal to terminal.
- Terminal
- Where you settle up and get judged.
- Seats
- Your capacity. Lose them and the jeep carries less.
- Palamuti
- The decorations you earn and fit to your jeep.
- Kasama
- A passenger. Name them, then find out what they do.
A trip, start to finish.
If you have played Tongits, three quarters of this is already familiar. The fourth is the part that makes it a run.
Draw, or take from the shed
The shed is the pile you can take from instead of drawing blind. Everyone can see what is in it, which means everyone can see what you took.
Meld
Sets and runs, the way you would at any table where Tongits is played.
Deliver
A passenger who reaches their destination pays a fare and frees a seat. Seats are your capacity — lose them and the jeep carries less for the rest of the run.
Settle
At the terminal you pay the boundary out of what you made. Whatever is left is yours, and it is the only thing you carry into tomorrow.
A day takes five to eight minutes — measured rather than designed, and the reason a day is a chapter instead of a whole evening.
There is nothing to play yet.
Jeepnits is at trial alpha. A prototype exists, but it is a debug harness — a table of plain playing cards and a button that downloads a log — and putting it in front of anyone would spend the game’s one first impression on something that looks like a spreadsheet. It goes public when it looks like a game.
The design work runs on a simulator, and the findings get posted as they land — including the ones that overturn something we had already said.