The Card Loom
A free online text adventure in five acts. A Coventry ribbon works in 1843, a Jacquard loom, and a machine that does exactly what you wrote down.
You are Esther Nye, thirty-one, card-cutter at Tarrant & Sons, Hill Top, Coventry. There are two other people in England doing this work who are women and you have met neither of them.
Over the summer Mr Tarrant borrowed four hundred pounds and put a beam engine in the yard and a Jacquard loom in the new shed. On Friday two buyers from Cheapside are coming to watch it weave figured ribbon. If it does, the works has a future. If it does not, the works has until about March.
You do not work the loom
You punch cards. The cards work the loom.
punch lift the first row · punch throw the cream shuttle ·
punch beat
There is no notation to learn: a card holds an ordinary command in the same language you have been
typing all along, and the only new idea is when it happens. chain lists what is
on the frame. run starts the engine. And then there is nothing you can do about any of
it, because a Jacquard chain is laced into an endless band and it comes round and round for as long
as there is steam.
The machine is honest
It never tells you that you are wrong. It tells you what it did, in cloth. A shuttle thrown with no shed open passes over every end in the warp and lays the weft on the face of the ribbon in a loop three inches long — and that is a float, and Mr Cleave can see a float from the door. A reed that beats up on an empty shed knocks, and every hand in the shed looks up, because that is the noise a loom makes when it is being made a fool of.
Debugging is the gameplay. Runs are cheap and repeatable early. On Thursday there are eleven hundred picks of real silk and a run that cannot be stopped without losing all of it, and everything you are able to do while it is going you have to have done before you pulled the strap over.
And then there are forty-one people on a hill
Four hundred yards up the road there are forty-one long windows glazed the full width of the top storey, because that is what you build when the family upstairs weaves. Behind about thirty of them somebody is weaving figured ribbon by hand this morning on a chain you cut. One of them is your father, who is sixty-three and cannot see a punch any more and does the figure by the feel of the treadle and a count in his head.
There are ninety-one people in the old shed whose living depends on Friday going well, and forty-one on that hill whose living depends on it not. Neither of those numbers is a reason. They are just the numbers.
And you are the only person in that works who can read a chain, which means you are the only person in England who could put a fault into one that would read as a limitation of the machine rather than a mistake by a person. The game knows that. So does everybody in it. Nobody asks you to.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.