From the Earth to the Moon

You are Impey Barbicane, president of the Baltimore Gun Club, in the autumn of 1865. The war is over, the Club has nothing left to shoot at, and you have called a meeting in order to propose firing a shot at the moon. Everything after that is engineering and persuasion.

If you have played parser interactive fiction before, you already know how to play this. Type PROPOSE and start reading. If you have not, the rest of this page takes about four minutes.

How to begin

Open the game from the Tronsoft Games library and press START on the cover. Pressing START also unlocks sound, because browsers will not let a page make noise until someone has touched it.

You begin in the Gun Club Hall with the whole membership waiting for you to say something. Type into the box at the bottom and press Enter. Your first command is PROPOSE.

If you get stuck at any point, type HINT. It gives three levels of help for whatever you are actually stuck on, from a nudge to the exact command. It costs no points and no turns, and it is not cheating; it is part of the design.

Controls

Type a command and press Enter. Every command also exists as a button beneath the text, so the game plays perfectly well on a phone or tablet with no keyboard at all. Command history is on the up and down arrow keys.

Looking at things

Handling things

People

The work

Eight verbs belong to this story and to no other. Each is the right thing to do in one or two places, and each will tell you politely that it is the wrong thing everywhere else.

Progress and session

Turn order

The game is strictly turn-based and waits for you indefinitely. Nothing in the world moves while you are thinking, and there is no timer anywhere in the story — not even on the first of December.

Each command resolves in the same order, which is worth knowing because it is the order the text appears in:

1. Your command is echoed, so a transcript reads as a conversation.
2. If you were moving, the attempt is resolved — a refusal happens here, and is a sentence rather than a locked door.
3. The action itself happens: you move, take, read, talk.
4. The new room is described, if you have arrived somewhere.
5. Everything your action caused is then printed: what Murchison says about it, quests completing, points scored, journal entries opening.

So the consequences always come last. If a quest completes, its line appears at the bottom of the turn.

Movement

Twelve directions: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, NORTHEAST, NORTHWEST, SOUTHEAST, SOUTHWEST, UP, DOWN, IN, OUT. The short forms N S E W NE NW SE SW U D all work.

The twenty rooms are grouped into five regions, and the chart panel draws each region as its own grid, filling in as you go. Rooms you have not seen yet show as dots. The line between two rooms is only drawn once you have been to one of them.

Some ways are shut until the story opens them, and when a way is shut the game says why rather than just refusing. That refusal is usually the hint you need. Nothing is ever locked behind an object you have to find; the story opens its own doors as the work gets done.

Scoring

There is no combat in this game. Nothing fights you except sand, iron, arithmetic, and Captain Nicholl.

The score runs to 150, made up like this:

Points are never taken away, and nothing you do can put a point out of reach. Using HINT costs nothing. Dying costs nothing but the moves since your last save.

Par is 84 moves. A player who knows exactly what to do finishes in 81. A first play usually runs to several hundred, which is the point.

Winning

You win by being inside the projectile with the screw plug home when the gun fires, on the first of December at 10:46:40 in the evening.

Getting there requires the eight required pieces of work, and the game will not let you board without them: the projectile has to be fitted out, the gun has to be charged, and Michel Ardan will physically hold the crane chain rather than let two men get into a bullet and start a quarrel on the way. Once you are aboard, seal the plug and WAIT.

A win at 120 points is a complete, honest ending. A win at 150 means you also carried away the four things worth carrying and got Belfast's great reflector onto Long's Peak in time for anyone to see where you went — which changes the last page.

Losing

You cannot lose this story by playing it badly. There is no timer, no move limit, no resource that runs out, nothing that can be destroyed, and no dead end: a save made at any point in the game can be finished.

You can, however, get yourself killed. There are exactly three places where that is possible, all three are described in the room text before you can reach them, and each is fatal only in the one place and the one direction:

• Going down the shaft before the cage is rigged. Nine hundred feet, no cable.
• Going in at the furnace ring while the launders are running. Sixty-eight thousand tons of iron are moving and will not stop for a president.
• Striking a light inside the powder magazine. Four hundred thousand pounds of gun-cotton.

Every other direction in those rooms is perfectly safe, and a light anywhere else in the story does nothing but light things. If you do die, the game tells you at length what happened and then stops accepting commands until you RESTORE or RESTART.

Saving and restarting

Saves live in your browser's local storage, under the key tronsoft_tife_from_the_earth_to_the_moon_save. They never leave your machine and are not uploaded anywhere. Clearing your browser's site data will delete them, and saves made in one browser will not appear in another.

Accessibility

The options panel has a high-contrast mode, a reduced-motion mode, and a narration toggle that reads new text aloud where the browser provides voices. Every control is reachable by keyboard alone, and nothing in the game depends on colour, sound, or reaction time.