Network: Keep It Online

Somewhere, right now, an engineer is staring at a dashboard full of red. Want to try? NETWORK is a calm, minimalist strategy puzzle about keeping a live system online. Requests arrive at doors, workers answer them, storage feeds them data. You place the boxes, draw the links and keep every request answered while your user count climbs. Fall behind and queues build, boxes overheat and crash, and the failure ripples out to everything that depended on them. Afterwards, an incident report tells you exactly what went wrong. HOW IT PLAYS • Tap a box, then tap a glowing box to link them. Only links that work light up. • After every wave, take one card of three: worker, storage, load balancer or an upgrade. • New doors open as you grow. Wire them in before their requests time out. • Overloaded box? Tap to boost it. Crashed box? Tap to reboot it sooner. • Drop too many requests and you've blown your error budget. Game over, post-mortem time. 180 LEVELS IN 20 CHAPTERS Your first link, famous outages, flash sales, new regions, long-distance links, a tight budget, someone else's tangled system, Black Friday and the night shift. Then the final exam. Each level has one goal and up to three stars, and clearing chapters 3, 6 and 12 unlocks new colour themes. ONE DAILY CHALLENGE, ONE ENDLESS BOARD A new challenge every day, the same for every player, each with a twist like spike day, slow wires or strict promise. Endless traffic rises until something breaks. Same traffic for everyone: the board measures skill, not luck. REAL TECHNIQUES, REAL TRADE-OFFS Read replicas, query caches, connection pooling, circuit breakers, horizontal scaling, CDN edge caching. Each upgrade helps and each one costs you something. A short field note explains the real-world version the first time you meet it. SMALL SCREEN, BIG OUTAGES • One hand, short sessions. Levels play offline. • Colour-blind friendly: shape, ring and fill say what a box is and how it's doing. • Google Play Games leaderboards and achievements. • Your progress comes back if you reinstall or switch phones. • Sound, haptics, reduced motion, and plain names if you'd rather not read "api-2". CYCLES: A RETRY, NEVER A RANK All 180 levels, the daily challenge and Endless are free. Cycles buy a second chance when a run goes down, and play after it never counts on the boards. Earn them by logging in, clearing chapters and the daily challenge, or buy a pack. No ads, no subscriptions, no energy meter, no loot boxes, no pay-to-win. Your error budget is the only thing that runs out.