Welcome to the cut
towpath is a small, comfy game about a stretch of English canal that belongs to you. There's a narrowboat moored to the bollards, a plot of grass waiting for flower beds, and a village over the humpback bridge with a pub, a shop, a church, and neighbors who talk to you.
Four residents keep you company and keep your garden working while you're away. Anything you've collected at Polkadot events can move in too: some collectibles are seeds, some are decorations, some are boat paint schemes, and some are villagers who join the crew and speed everything up.
It runs in your browser, saves its heart on the Paseo test network, and never asks you to understand any of that. Play it at towpath.paseo.li.
Player's guide
How to grow, harvest, and sell. What the crew does while you sleep. Claiming collectibles, repainting your boat, sharing your village, and visiting friends. Plus honest answers to the questions everyone asks.
Engineering
One set of game rules compiled three ways, a world that is literally its own event log, a smart contract that replays your garden, and why the economy numbers came out of a Monte Carlo simulator. For the curious and the suspicious.
The road ahead
towpath grows at a narrowboat's pace. This is what's coming, in roughly the order it's planned. No dates, because dates are how cozy games become stressful ones.
Race days on the green
The village green will host scheduled races with friendly wagers. Outcomes come from a deterministic race seeded by a future block's hash: unknowable before the start, checkable by anyone after. Rarity and villager stats stay out of the odds on purpose, so a race is a flutter, never an arms race.
Villages that survive anything
The verifier contract is built and tested; once it's deployed, sharing your village also anchors it on chain. From then on, signing in on any device rebuilds your whole village from its anchored story, with no account setup and no backup chores.
The pool
One shared pool of collectibles for every player everywhere, in the spirit of a village free bin: items get contributed into it and anyone, from any village, can take one out for in-game coins. Pool items are the tradeable tier. Your event collectibles are a different thing entirely: they're attendance mementos, they stay yours, and nothing here ever asks you to give one up.
Trading up
Within the pool, several items of one rarity will combine into a single item of the next rarity up, the way trading card kids have always done it. The roll is provably fair: seeded by a block hash that doesn't exist when you commit, verifiable by anyone once it does. The details live in a technical note shipping alongside the feature.
Trading with each other
Player-to-player trades and a small marketplace, with one rule carved in stone: anything exchanged for real value is cosmetic only. Paint schemes, decorations, prestige. Villager stats and anything that touches the economy can be earned or collected at events, never bought. This rule outranks every future feature idea, including ours.
Smaller comforts on the way
Claimed villagers wandering the village instead of only working behind the scenes, more decorations, more races' worth of things to do on the green, and whatever the towpath asks for next.
The residents
