I was originally planning on assembling a videogame for this project, but having never successfully finished a videogame project in my life I turned to the slightly-easier-to-produce tabletop game.

I wanted to make something that was simple to play and didn't require too much setup or components -- a deck of cards and a pencil should suffice!

Tempest is a solo game where you try to rescue citizens in a mighty storm, navigating the streets as the weather gets progressively worse. I added some roguelike elements as well because it's 2025.

I didn't read the entire book, but the intro was something else! I pulled lots of inspiration from there alone. All the religious references which lead me to the idea that the storm was, in some way, sentient -- that the player was not only saving citizens, but actively competing with the storm. From this I derived the gameplay mechanic where both the storm and player draw from the same pool of cards, with he player choosing which deck the storm action is drawn from and then drawing their own card from the other deck.

By design the game uses cards for randomization, but by splitting the cards into 4 decks by suit and limiting each day to limited cards, the player gets to use card-counting to begin to make more and more strategic decisions as their options shrink. To me this felt like the player "figuring out" the storm, and I really liked how it played.

The game is admittedly almost entirely untested. While I played the first 2 levels several times, the third, and especially final level remain completely unplayed. Perhaps they will be fun, perhaps they will be too easy. Perhaps they're impossible to beat!

I'm dedicating the game to the public domain in hopes that if someone finds it fun they can riff off of it and make something more complete. I think there's some neat ideas in this little game, and I hope somebody enjoys it.

Project thumbnail from "Jonah Thrown into the Stormy Sea, Justus Sadeler 1610/1620

• PDF Version (small pages for easy phone viewing)
• HTML Version (for tweaking)
• Printable PDF (I've tried to make it printable via this web tool)