You are the Elder. You had a vision of a doomed future, so you took a handful of Pips, your fellow villagers, and led them to an empty valley to start anew.
They need your guidance to survive the events foretold by the Prophecy, so make sure your Pips work hard!
Dotage is a game with deep worker placement mechanics inspired by board games, as well as a roguelike survival village builder.
Will you fulfill the Prophecy?
To the public, it was a myth. A ghost in the machine. To Jax, a mid-level data janitor for the Triad megacorp, it was Tuesday. His job was to delete the un-deletable: footage of off-the-books arrests, whispers of prototype weapons, the final screams of a politician who took the wrong bribe. DEBS was the furnace where the digital sins of the rich were burned.
A story was a bomb. And Jax had just lit the fuse.
He looked at the timer on the file. 20:47. Thirteen minutes until the switch flipped and every deleted crime, every buried lie, every ghost in the DEBS machine was broadcast live to every screen on Earth.
And then, the truth began to pour out. Not just about the Mass Driver. About everything. To the public, it was a myth
On the screen, the Primary Ocular Backup file began to… replicate. It cloned itself, once, twice, a thousand times, hiding in the gaps of the crashing system. “Nice try, Triad.” Jax whispered. At 21:00 exactly, every screen in Neo-Tokyo—from the Yakuza-run ramen stands to the president’s private penthouse—flickered. A single phrase appeared in stark white text against black:
The year is 2147. The skyline of Neo-Tokyo is a jagged scar of chrome and neon, but eighteen floors below the glittering corporate spires lies the true heart of the city: the system.
Jax had a choice. Run. Or fight.
Tonight, however, a single file refused to die.
The red panic button on his console lit up. A deep, synthetic voice intoned: “Unauthorized access detected. DEBS entering Purge Protocol. All personnel, stand by for system memory wipe.” They knew. They were going to delete the entire system—including the kill agent.
It was a simple audio log, timestamped from that morning. Labeled: Primary Ocular Backup – Dr. Aris Thorne. His job was to delete the un-deletable: footage
Jax tapped play, expecting another boring compliance review. Instead, he heard a man’s voice, calm but rushed. “If you’re listening to this on DEBS, you’re not a cleaner. You’re a witness. I’ve hidden a memetic kill agent inside the root directory of the system. Every time you ‘delete’ a file, you’re not erasing it. You’re copying it to a private satellite I launched in ’42. DEBS isn’t a black site. It’s a memory palace. A dead man’s switch. And tonight, at 21:00, when they try to delete the evidence of the Mass Driver accident… the switch will flip.” Jax’s blood ran cold. The Mass Driver accident that killed 40,000 in the orbital ring? The official report said a micro-meteor. But Dr. Thorne’s file claimed it was a weapons test gone wrong. A test ordered by the very board of directors that signed Jax’s paychecks.
But as the first sirens began to wail in the distance, he smiled. They had built DEBS to bury their dead. Instead, it had become a tombstone for their empire. And sometimes, a tombstone is just a stone. But a story?