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Venueweave field guide

Venueweave is a free, single-player route-planning strategy game. Each fictional venue gives several groups two possible paths through a shared floor plan, and you choose one route per group while respecting walking distance, step-free access, a limited sign stock, corridor capacity, closures, one-way links, and opposing movement in narrow passages.

It is made for players who enjoy spatial puzzles, humane design constraints, and decisions that can be explained. It is not for operating a real venue.

How do I complete a venue?

Read the field brief and select one route for every group. The map and capacity bars update immediately, while the planning check names the first few unresolved constraints in plain language. “Explain current risk” identifies the most useful next concern without changing your choices. When the plan is valid, choose “Simulate the flow.” A completion record keeps your best medal, score, sign use, hints, and retries. You can revisit any campaign venue, and the rolling incident archive offers date-specific variations whose verified answers differ from their base briefs.

What does the +15% resilience check do?

The Resilience Desk increases every group size by fifteen percent, rounding each group up to a whole person, then evaluates the routes already on your desk. It reports extra attendees, peak corridor use, the tightest named corridor, remaining headroom, and any resulting game constraints. The check does not alter your routes, score, medal, hint count, or saved record. It is a second layer for players who want to compare a merely valid plan with one that has breathing room. All capacities remain fictional puzzle values and are not a substitute for code, crowd modelling, accessibility review, or professional safety advice.

Are hints, animation, or a mouse required?

No. Routing nudges are free and never lock content, though they are recorded so an unaided run can be distinguished fairly. Every route is a regular keyboard-operable button with a visible focus state and an aria-pressed state. The venue diagram has a full text alternative under "Open text route map". That list names every link with its two places, its length in metres, its current load against its game capacity, whether it is step-free or stairs, whether it is narrow, whether it is one-way, whether it is closed, and which direction each assigned route currently uses it in. It then names every group with its assigned route as a place-by-place sequence, the named links that route uses with their current load against capacity, the resulting walk, its step-free status, its sign cost, its size, its walking limit, and whether it requires a step-free route. Preferences include reduce motion, which removes the moving dots, high contrast marks, and larger text. Reduce motion is switched on automatically when the browser reports a reduced-motion preference, and the moving dots are suppressed in that case whatever the preference panel says. Keys 1, 2, and 3 cycle the route for each group; S simulates, T runs the surge check, E explains the current risk, N reveals a nudge, C clears the plan, and the question mark key opens the shortcut list from anywhere.

Does anything teach me the game?

The first campaign venue opens with a four-step walkthrough: read what each group needs, give every group a route, read the planning check, and walk the plan. It can be skipped at any point and never returns once closed; resetting local progress brings it back. Separately, every desk carries a rules panel that names each rule the planner will enforce in that venue before you can break it, so no failure arrives as a surprise.

What is the surge brief?

An optional harder standard in Preferences. With it switched on, a Gold or Silver plan must also survive a 15% rise in every group size; a plan that buckles is held at Bronze. Six of the twelve venues have a route set that can survive the rise. In the other six the result screen says so plainly and the medal stands as earned, because the game never asks for something the venue cannot give.

Exactly which rules does the planner enforce?

Seven, and only these seven. A group whose brief requires step-free access may not be routed over a link marked as stairs. A group’s walk may not exceed its stated maximum distance in metres. The total sign cost of the chosen routes may not exceed the venue’s sign budget. No link may carry more people than its game capacity. A link marked narrow may not carry two groups in opposite directions. A closed link may not be used at all. A one-way link may only be walked in its stated direction. Every one of those is reported in plain language in the planning check, is visible in the text route map, and is never signalled by colour alone. Nothing else is scored as a failure: the diagram’s colours, the animation, and the resilience desk change no outcome.

How do I see which links a route uses?

Every route button lists the links it walks under its distance and sign cost, and pointing at or focusing that button highlights exactly those links on the floor plan. The same links, with their loads, are written out in the text route map. On a narrow screen the floor plan scrolls sideways inside its panel; a note appears when it does, and the plan re-centres on the group you last routed.

What happens after a Gold plan?

The result card offers the +15% surge check as the obvious next step. It changes no score, medal, or record. A plan that holds through the surge check is marked Surge proof on the result card and beside that venue in the operations book.

Does the share button show what it copied?

Yes. "Copy field report" writes a spoiler-free summary to the clipboard and prints the exact text in the result panel with a copied or not-copied state, so you can read it or select it by hand when a browser refuses clipboard access.

Where can I see my own record?

Preferences opens a desk statistics panel holding campaign venues balanced, daily incidents resolved, the current daily run, Gold, Silver and Bronze counts, best and average plan score, plans balanced without a nudge, simulations run, simulated attendees routed, nudges used, plans cleared, and distinctions earned. The result card adds the score arithmetic for the plan you just ran, your best for that brief, and the authored benchmark: the score of this brief's verified route set flown with no nudges and no cleared plans, which is what Gold requires. It also states how many legal route sets the brief has and how many of them reach Gold, so a tutorial venue with a single legal answer says so, and it gives a one-line suggestion of what to try next, derived from where your score was lost. The daily run in days appears only on a daily incident result, where it means something.

What is saved, and can I move it?

Venueweave needs no account and sends no gameplay data to a remote service. Campaign records, daily records, achievements, drafts, and preferences stay in this browser’s local storage. Each activity has its own protected draft, so leaving one brief does not overwrite another. The Preferences dialog can export a schema-checked JSON progress file and import it on another browser. Imports are size-limited and rejected if the app identity, schema, dates, counters, or record shapes are invalid. Reset removes Venueweave’s local data after confirmation.

Can Venueweave be played offline?

Yes. After a successful first load, the app’s service worker keeps the authored campaign, interface, guide, research boundary, and privacy page available offline. There are no cross-game runtime dependencies, trackers, accounts, ads, or network-fetched puzzle assets. When a newer release is published, a small notice appears with a Reload button; nothing reloads on its own, so an in-progress plan is never interrupted. If you are studying the design boundary, see the research and safety notes; for storage details, read the privacy page.