Made Men

Havenport, New Jersey. December 1971.

You are a case agent at the Newark field office and you have been on this faction since the winter. You have nothing a prosecutor would take. No wire on a made man. No photograph of a crime. No witness who will say a surname out loud.

What you have is a drawer.

Sixteen surveillance photographs of men who stand outside a social club on Alden Street. A book of remembrance signed at a funeral. A newspaper columnist who describes everybody and names nobody. An informant who poured drinks in that back room for four years and will not put a name to a single face.

Every one of those files is true, and not one of them says who anybody is.

Newark wants a table of organisation on the wall by the new year: one boss, one underboss, one consigliere with no crew of his own, two captains, and three buttons tied to the captain who carries them. For each man a photograph, a legal name, and the name he is actually called.

No single document will give you two of those three together. You get them by putting one file against another.

How it works

• Search the drawer, don't browse it. Type a name, a street, a pier, a date. What you type is the only thing you carry from one file to the next.
• Nothing states an answer. Every entry on that board is the join between two sources — a nickname in a newspaper column, a middle name on a police card, a bail bond stood by the wrong man.
• A man locks himself. The moment his photograph, his legal name and his street name are all right together, he stamps confirmed. There is no submit button and no partial credit: two right and one wrong looks exactly like three wrong. Guessing is permitted. It is simply hopeless.
• Pick up the telephone. A Western Electric 500 with a working rotary dial and thirty-five numbers that answer. A pretext call will corroborate the paper, contradict it, or get you hung up on. No voice will ever hand you an answer.
• Half the men in that drawer were never initiated. The informant report names four sorts of non-member and says outright that it is not a full list. Strike them out yourself. Nobody marks it for you and nobody checks it.

And then it's 1979

Finish the 1971 chart and the case reopens eight years later, on the same eight boxes. The old man is in the ground. Three men are sitting in chairs that weren't theirs. Two men are new — and one of them is a name you were told, in writing, was not a member.

Two of the eight seats have nobody in them at all, and Newark will not accept a guess at which two. A seat recorded as empty is an entry like any other: right or wrong, with nothing said back.

Six acts across two charts. Forty-six documents. Thirty surveillance photographs. A desk with a telephone, a notebook, a calendar and a radio with five stations on the dial.

Nothing in the drawer will tell you who anybody is. That is the whole game.

Notes

• Plays in the browser. No install, no account, no network — the game makes no external requests and everything is served from the page.
• Progress is saved in your own browser on this device only. Nothing is sent anywhere.
• Needs a mouse or trackpad and a bit of screen. It is not designed for phones.
• Four hints per chart, if you want them. The first is on the house.
• Expect four to eight hours for both charts, and a notebook.

Credits

Design, writing and code by Werner Viljoen for Rogue Dog Indie Game Studio.

Music from https://www.FesliyanStudios.com, composed by David Fesliyan.

Havenport, its faction, and every person, document, telephone number and newspaper in this game are fictional.