Who holds the lamp?
The Revolution
Raise the city
Harder start
Cheap, fast and fragile. Spread ideas in the salons, raise the faubourgs, and stop your radicals before they burn the city you want to win.
- Spends
- Influence
- Watches
- Heat
The Law
Hold the city
Stronger start
Rich, strong and slow. Keep order without turning every street against you, and watch your own generals and spies.
- Spends
- Treasury
- Watches
- Legitimacy
The 13 chapters
One city, played from the last years of the kings to a flooded, watched Paris of glass.
- The Gilded Cage1783 to 1789Salons, pamphlets and masked assassins against a rich but broke crown. The Bastille still stands. Oil lanterns light one street in five.Oil lanterns
- Year of Fire1789 to 1794The Revolution comes into the open, takes the city and becomes the government. Cockades, pikes and crowds, then the shadow of the blade.Oil lanterns
- The Eagle's Shadow1799 to 1815A general takes the city, then the crown. The Law becomes a police state; the Revolution becomes a quarrel of royalists, old Jacobins and exiles who agree on one thing only.Oil lanterns
- Barricade Summers1830 to 1848Three risings in eighteen years, a cholera summer between them, and a finale where the new republic turns its guns on the workers who made it.Gas lamps
- Straight Lines1851 to 1870The Eagle's nephew takes power and tears the old city down to build boulevards troops can march along. The map itself changes hands, and in 1860 it grows from twelve districts to twenty.Gas lamps
- Seventy-Two Days1871The roles flip. The Revolution governs a starving city and must pay for it every turn, while the Law besieges Paris from Versailles and fights its way back in, street by street.Gas lamps
- Home Fires1914 to 1918The war is at the edge of the map and Paris is the home front: the Law keeps the factories producing and the nation united, the Revolution turns exhaustion, strikes and censorship into a movement.Electric light
- The Grey Years1940 to 1944A fictional foreign power, the Northern Directorate, occupies Paris. The Revolution is the Resistance; the Law is the city's own Prefecture and police, whose best ending is to turn against the occupier at the right moment.Electric light
- Cold Light1945 to 1962Two blocs fund both sides through the back door, a war overseas wears the country down, and a secret army of bombers, the Phantom Legion, forces the two sides into uneasy common cause.Electric light
- Beneath the Stones1968Students pull up the cobblestones, ten million workers stop, the President vanishes for a day, and then a silent majority marches. The Revolution must keep students and workers together; the Law must outlast them.Sodium and neon
- Paper Fortunes2000 to 2010Markets crash twice, the outer ring boils over, and the fight moves to youth contracts, refineries and bank bailouts, on a map that now reaches beyond the ring road.Sodium and neon
- Saturdays2018 to 2024A leaderless movement in fluorescent vests takes the roundabouts and the Saturdays. The Revolution cannot give orders, only proposals; the Law fights a war of images in which every use of force can go viral.LED
- The Glass City2041 to 2049A hotter, flooded, fully watched Paris run partly by an AI administrator, the Steward. The Law can win through total surveillance, the Revolution through blind spots and truth, and the last finale reads your whole campaign.The glass city