Systems — GORGED

Three things sit on top of the two inputs: a roster of nine diggers that each give something up, an arena that stops taking joiners and then starts taking the ground back, and a campaign you play alone to earn the crew.

Nine diggers. Every one of them is a trade.

There is no upgrade in GORGED. Every digger past the first gives something up for what it gains, and the fastest one in the game is also the one that cannot boost at all. Which one is best depends entirely on the ground you picked and how you like to kill.

These are the lines the game itself prints under each card, because a website that described them differently would be describing a different game.

Mole Rat Scavenger: corpses from further away. The reference digger, and the one everything else is measured against. Nothing about it is bad; it just eats the dead from a longer reach than anyone else.

Cave Salamander Fast in water, slow everywhere else. A digger that turns the map into the choice. In the aquifer band it outruns anything down there. Above it, it is the slowest thing on the field.

Tunnel Drill Turns badly; boost grinds instead of dying. The one digger for which un-dug rock is not a wall. It pays for that with a turning circle you can see from across the arena — it cannot cut anyone off in a tight space.

Fungal Network Grows fast from every meal; can never boost. It becomes a wall quicker than anything else and then has no way to close a gap. It kills by being somewhere first, never by catching up.

Bone Train Corpses feed it double; plain food, half. A vulture. It starves in a quiet arena and doubles in size in a loud one, which makes the endgame its whole game.

Pipeline Layer Slow, until it holds a straight line. Momentum you have to commit to. Every turn throws away everything you built, so it is the digger that punishes flinching.

Auger Beast Boost costs half; tunnels close behind it. A comet. It can spend speed twice as freely as anyone, and it seals its own wake — so it cannot double back down the road it just made, and neither can whoever was chasing it.

Acid Ooze Its trail burns everyone — itself included. A blade with no handle. The trail kills any head that enters it and does not check whose head it is, which makes your own minimum turning circle a live hazard.

Root Drill Slowest digger; its tunnels kill anyone boosting. A trapper. Walking its web is always safe, so it is territory rather than a minefield — but nobody can chase through it at speed, which is the only way anyone chases.

The roster is open in the arena. Anything you have earned can be taken online, and nothing has to be earned to play there — the campaign gates the crew, and it gates nothing else.

The arena stops taking joiners, then starts taking the ground

An arena holds ten diggers. It fills with people where there are people and with bots where there are not, and it runs in four phases you can watch happen.

Open Anyone can join, and dying costs you nothing. A death here puts you in a fresh arena in under a second — you did not lose a match, you left one.

Locked Nobody new arrives, and the bots forfeit the field. From this moment a death is a permanent removal and the pool can only get smaller. The countdown to the lock is on screen the whole time, because a lock that arrived unannounced would make the win mean nothing.

Endgame The ground comes back. Chew through enough of the arena and rock starts caving in at random while an outer edge closes on a fixed clock. Both are lethal to touch. The finale hands walls back to a field that spent the whole run destroying them.

Ended One digger is still moving. That is the win. Nobody else gets a loss, because they were already somewhere else — which is the whole reason the arena is allowed to end at all.

The collapse always leaves a way through. You will never be sealed in with no exit. You may very well be sealed in with someone.

Nine countries, nine kinds of ground

A country is not a skin. Each one changes what the rock does, which changes what cutting somebody off costs you.

The Big Rocks — big rocks block the way; go around or over. The baseline, and the one to learn the cut on.
United States — wide open rooms, nowhere to hide.
Brazil — roots grow back and refill your tunnels, so map control is rented rather than owned.
United Kingdom — narrow brick tunnels of a fixed size you cannot widen. Everyone can use them and nobody can dig them.
Iceland — hard rock everywhere; the lava tubes are the fast route.
Australia — the hardest rock in the game. Every tunnel is slow going.
Egypt — sand fills back in, except near the river.
Mexico — sinkholes drop you straight through the rock.
Japan — the ground shakes and collapses every twenty seconds.

What you ate is on your back

Your tail shows the minerals you swallowed, in the order you swallowed them. A rival's entire run is legible from across the arena, which is what turns a fat digger from an obstacle into a target.

The campaign is where the crew is earned

One player, nine bots, no network required — the campaign is playable on a plane and it is the only mode you can pause. It exists to hand you the roster, and it prices that with a dial you set before every run.

Four rungs, and the harder ones pay more

The dial does not change how many diggers are down there; it changes who they are. The field is always nine, because below that the arena cannot reach its own endgame and a run could only ever end with you dying.

Calm — 0.5× Nobody is looking for you. Drifters only: they dig, they wander, and they will kill you by being in the way rather than by meaning to.

Restless — 2× Some of them forage, and they are worth eating. The first rung teaches hunting rather than fleeing — a forager is a moving prize that runs away.

Hunting — 3× The arena's own mix: cutters, and one apex. This rung is the field you meet online, which is what makes it the honest middle of the dial.

Savage — 5× Five cutters and the apex. The apex is the only digger on the field that boosts, and it only does it down ground it has already checked.

What a run is worth

Length is the big number: 10 points a segment. Depth is 1 a row, because anybody can dig down. Kills are where the campaign stops looking like the arena — in a shared arena a kill is a flat 50, and in the campaign the nth kill of a run pays n bounties of 100. The first is 100, the second another 200, the third another 300.

That escalation is the mode's risk dial. The moment you are longest and have the most to lose is exactly the moment the next kill is worth the most, and going after it is a decision rather than a habit.

Only a win banks. The whole run — length, kills, depth, multiplied by the rung you picked — counts for nothing unless you are the last digger moving. Dying at 6,000 points banks zero. The unlock ladder is priced in wins, not in runs.

The career board, and why it is slow

Banked points accumulate into a career total, and that total is ranked against everyone else's. It is also the one number in GORGED your own device is not allowed to compute.

When a campaign run ends, the game does not send a score. It sends the seed, the country, the digger, the rung, and every input you made, one entry per tick — and the server replays the entire run on its own copy of the game to find out what happened. The length, the kills, the depth and the win are all read off that replay. There is no number on the wire for anybody to change.

Two consequences worth knowing, because both are visible:

A run played offline banks nothing. There is no queue of pending runs waiting for a connection — a file like that is a file you could copy to bank one good run repeatedly.
The board's number and your device's number are the same number. Your device keeps a copy so the diggers you earned are still there with no signal, but it only ever raises that copy to what the server says. It never counts for itself.

Unlocks

Nine diggers, eight rungs to climb, from 8,000 career points to 420,000. The ladder is deliberately long: it is sized in wins at the difficulty you actually play, not in runs attempted.

Nothing on the ladder is for sale, and nothing on it is a stat increase. Every digger it hands you gives something up for what it gains, and the arena's roster is open to everyone regardless. What you are unlocking is more ways to play, not a better digger.

The crew, the arena, and the ladder