How the pace works

Waybill is not a game you finish in a sitting. The flagship world runs one game day per real hour, it opened in 1830, and it does not end. That is the whole of the pace, and everything below follows from it.

Track and trains take game time

A corridor is surveyed, graded and laid while the world turns, and a season of grading takes a season. A locomotive on order is built. A train underway is running real miles between two cities. None of it needs you watching.

The board says when, on your clock

A game date is not something you can plan an evening around, so any road with work under way carries one line at the top of its inspector and on the board's status strip, naming the work, the day it opens, and when that day is on the wall clock:

Grading Boston – Worcester. Opens 14 March 1831 — Thursday about 2 pm.

The wall-clock half changes shape with how far off it is. Under an hour it counts minutes — in about 40 minutes. Later the same day it names the hour — today about 6 pm. Inside a week it gives the weekday and the hour. Beyond that it gives the date. If the clock is paused it says paused, because a world that is not running will never reach the instant.

The same line ends with the next thing that does not wait on track: order your first locomotive, post your tariff, or go and see who else is building nearby.

The world runs while you are away

Your trains earn overnight and your rivals build overnight. Check in the way you would read the morning paper — the news, a tariff, a locomotive, a rival's move — and the silence between visits is the game working, not the game stuck.

Have the mail tell you

You do not have to guess when to come back. The first corridor your railroad opens sends you a wire the moment it opens, instead of waiting for the next morning's dispatch. The switches for both are at the bottom of your shelf: Urgent wires for the rare and immediate, the morning dispatch for one daily report from your superintendents. Every mail carries its own unsubscribe link.

See the whole loop in fifteen minutes

If an hour-long day is hard to picture, play the Fifth Charter. It is free, needs no account, and runs a game day per minute — so surveying, the wait, the first train and the first revenue all happen in one sitting. Watch that loop at minute scale and the flagship's hour-long day reads as a promise.