Thin Ice
by
Back to the station

Erebus Station · Winter Orders

How to Play

An Antarctic research station in the white season. A crew in blazing parkas keeps the place humming — except some of them came back wrong from the last supply run.

The fog of war is white glare

Every other deduction game reaches for darkness. Here the world past your bubble of clear air is blinding — same radius on every device, so a big screen never buys a longer sightline.

4–15 players · one long round · ~15 min

The Watch

Walk

1. Waddle the station

Everyone moves freely around one hand-crafted base — labs, kennels, boiler room, mess hall, and the exposed outdoor walkways between them. There are no turns and no queue. Every alibi you will ever give is a place you were and a person who saw you there.

Work

2. Do the season's work

Researchers each carry a short list of jobs: thaw the cores, wind the seismograph, feed the huskies, boil the kettle. Walk to the machine and the camera pushes in — the minigame is the machine. Every job done nudges the station's work bar toward a win for the living.

Whiteout

3. Trust the glare, not the dark

Vision is a bubble of clear air around you; past it the storm goes pure white. It is the same radius on a phone and a 27-inch monitor — a bigger screen buys crisper snow, never a longer sightline. Someone can be two paces away in the white and you will never know.

The Frostbitten

Freeze

One to three of the crew came back wrong from the supply run. The cold doesn't touch them, and they ice colleagues solid one corridor at a time — on a cooldown, so a Frostbitten who vanishes for a minute has some explaining to do.

Sabotage

Kill the boiler, jam the doors, black out the comms. Sabotage buys cover and forces the crew to drop their jobs and run somewhere — which is exactly when people end up alone.

Ducts

The Frostbitten fit through the heating ducts and pop out rooms away in seconds. If someone was in Lab B and then, impossibly, in the kennels, the ducts are the reason.

Musters

The bell

Find a colleague in a block of ice and hit REPORT — or pull the muster bell if you just want the room. You only get so many rings, so spend them. Either way the klaxon snaps every phone to the mess hall and the station stops dead.

Argue out loud

Ninety seconds of shouting. Who was where, who walked past whom, who was suspiciously alone by the boiler. This is the whole game — the station is just the machine that generates arguments.

Secret ballot

Thirty seconds, one vote each, nobody sees your chit. A majority puts someone on the supply sled and waves them off into the white — and at the edge of sight the sled's flag runs up their true colours. A tie freezes nobody: the station goes back to work and the cold ones get another watch.

Winning

Finish the work

The living win the moment the season's work bar fills — even if half the crew is in ice cubes.

Sled them all

The living win when the last Frostbitten is voted onto the supply sled.

Outnumber the crew

The Frostbitten win when they equal the living — at that point nobody can out-vote them.

Let the boiler go

The Frostbitten win if a boiler failure runs its full clock unfixed and the base freezes solid.

Nobody is ever out

Frozen crew come back as frost-wisps. You can still drift the station and finish your jobs for the living side — you just can't talk at the muster. Getting iced on minute two never means sitting on your hands for ten.

4–15 players · phones & desktops

Open a station