

I'm looking for playtesters — the first people to fly this and tell me what's broken or boring.

Gatefall is a space-empire sim in the spirit of X4 that runs entirely in a browser tab. No download, no account, nothing to install, and it works on a phone.

You start as one pilot: a cheap civilian hull, minimum fittings, and a debt that starts charging interest on turn one. Nothing is chasing you and nothing is on a timer — the game is turn-based, one turn is one hour of in-game time, and turns only pass when you do something: fly a leg, jump a gate, sweep a wreck, wait. Close the tab mid-run and you lose nothing, because nothing runs on a real-world clock. Your run is saved in the browser and picked up exactly where you left it.

**What you can actually do in this build:**

* **Trade.** Every station's prices come from its actual stock, so a big sell you make depresses the price for the next run. Buy low, find a market that's short, don't get greedy.
* **Work a field.** Mine asteroids, salvage the debris fields that battles leave behind, and run passengers on a middle hull with cabins.
* **Explore** 20 sectors linked by ancient jump gates: scan stations and wrecks, and find derelicts — abandoned hulls and floating containers you can claim with a tractor.
* **Fight.** Attack, board, take prizes. You never die: you eject, lose the hull and the cargo, keep your credits, and get rescued within a turn.
* **Buy and refit** ships, and get stopped by customs if you're carrying contraband through a power that bans it.
* **Own more than one hull.** Your hulls share one wallet but not one hold. Park a second hull at a berth and you can move fuel and cargo between the pair, refuel and repair her, rename her, or send her somewhere on her own while you get on with your run. (Your hulls don't trade for you yet — you fly her, or you park her.)
* **Watch the security field.** Stations don't control whole sectors, they control parts of them, and where coverage ends is where pirates live.
* **Mind the Ashborn** — a machine race that negotiates with nobody, wanders in, and eats anything technological, including your ship.
* **Pick your start.** Six species run the Reach's factories, shipyards and trade ports, including the Korvax Concord (merchants), the Ythran Sanctum (theocrats with the best shields), the Draakhi Clans (best guns, thinnest hulls), and the Nemuun Enclave (biotech pacifists who won't sell you a weapon). You pick who you start among.

**Development notice — read this before you click.** This is an early build of the first slice. The shared online universe — "the Reach" — is not open yet: it's the big feature where everyone plays in the same world and your trades and kills land on other players, and it opens to everyone when development is complete. Until then the entire game plays in your browser without it, single-player, with all of the above working. If you click "Try the link" in the game's Reach tab, it tells you the same thing rather than pretending — and you'll also see **"the Reach" struck out in red** under the title. Same notice, not a rendering bug.

Also not in the build yet: building your own stations, and fleets you command in bulk. Soon.

**What I want back from you**

You're the first people to fly it, so the most useful report is short and specific:

* Did you know what to do in the first ten minutes? If not, which screen left you guessing?
* Did the first hour feel like a shortage you could solve, or just a wall?
* What broke — a button that does nothing, a number that goes backwards, a screen that tells you something untrue. If something acts strange, reload first: it's a hosted generator, so I can push fixes and a reload usually picks them up.
* What you played on: phone or desktop. Phone-first is a design rule of mine and I want to know whether it holds up.
* What was boring. I can't fix that one without being told.

Rough template if it helps: **device + roughly what turn you got to + the one thing that confused you + anything broken.**

👉 [https://perchance.org/gatefall](https://perchance.org/gatefall)

Gatefall needs playtesters — a text-driven space-empire sim you fly in a browser tab (X4-flavoured trade, mining, salvage and piracy; no download, no account, works on a phone)