TABESTRY

A town lives in your browser tabs. Your attention is the thread that holds it together.

Working taglines: "Keep tabs. Weave lives." · "A game woven from your attention." · "Every tab is a life."

High concept

Tabestry is an ambient narrative simulation played across real browser tabs. Each open tab is one inhabitant of a small woolpunk town — a living vignette that continues, dimly, even when you're not looking. You are the town's half-believed folk deity: a presence the townsfolk call the Regard, seated at a loom the size of a browser.

The core verb is moving between tabs. Your attention is the shuttle. When you switch from one tab to another, you physically carry things between lives — a rumor, a letter, an apology, a fever, a melody — because you are the only way anything travels from one person's story into another's. The sequence of your visits is recorded, day by day, as rows of weft on a loom, and the patterns you fall into (returning, alternating, neglecting, reuniting) are recognized as real weave structures — tabby, twill, satin — with mechanical and narrative consequences.

At the end of each week, your visit history is rendered into a Sunday Panel: a generated, Bayeux-style woven frieze depicting what actually happened in your town — a shareable artifact at your permanent URL. Over months, the panels join into a continuous tapestry: the chronicle of a town that existed only because you kept looking at it.

There is no game like this. That is the point, and the name is load-bearing three times over.

Why "Tabestry"

• Tab — the game lives in browser tabs, and the Tab key is a first-class controller (the whole game is keyboard-navigable; focus traversal is weaving).
• Tabby — the real textile term for plain weave, the simplest over-under structure. Your default daily rhythm produces "tabby cloth." (Also: the town cat, Selvedge, is a tabby. Obviously.)
• Tapestry — the output. The game continuously weaves a pictorial chronicle of your choices, and the chronicle is the reward.

The English idiom completes it: this is literally a game about keeping tabs on people — and about what your attention does to the ones you keep it on.

A morning in Tabestry

You open your browser. Nine pinned tabs glow along the strip like threads on a loom. One title has changed overnight: "Mara is pacing." You visit her first. She has written an apology to Harlan but won't send it; you take it up — the shuttle now carries Mara's apology (fades in 3 passes). You pass through the kiln tab to check the fire — the shuttle picks up a smell of cedar smoke — then into Harlan's tab, where the apology arrives smelling of the kiln where they first met. Because you routed it that way. Harlan softens. In the tab strip, two threads that have run parallel for weeks finally cross. Selvedge the cat, walking the title bars, sits down between them.

Session length: ten to twenty minutes, once or twice a day. Tabestry is not a game you binge; it's a game you keep, like a plant on a windowsill — except the plant is a town, and it remembers everything.

Design pillars

1. The browser is the board. Tabs, pins, titles, favicons, and focus are sacred game verbs, not chrome. No other game treats the tab strip as a loom.
2. Attention is the only currency, and it is spent by moving. Not clicks, not grind. Where you look, in what order, and what you carry — that is the entire skill of the game.
3. Everything weaves into permanent cloth. No resets, no respawns. History is rendered, visibly, into tapestry you can scroll and share. The save file is the artwork.
4. Slow by design, honest about attention. A game about attention must never abuse it: no push notifications, no red badges, no FOMO timers. The game never rings a bell; it only leaves lint on your sill.
5. Legible depth. The weave grammar borrows real textile logic, so mastery feels like learning a craft, not memorizing a meta.

The fiction

The town is called Shed — in weaving, the shed is the gap that opens between warp threads for the shuttle to pass through. The town exists, quite literally, in the opening your attention makes.

Shed's folk religion holds that the world is cloth and that someone keeps the pattern. The townsfolk feel a faint warmth when watched — they call it the Regard — and they argue about whether it exists. Some leave gifts on windowsills for it. One of them is writing a heretical pamphlet arguing that the Regard is just weather. (You can carry the pamphlet. To the priest. If you're feeling wicked.)

At the edges of the valley is the Fray: a slow, patient unraveling that eats unattended pattern. Tightly woven lives — people bound by crossings, knots, and habits you've built — resist it. Isolated threads fray first. The Fray is not a villain; it is what happens to anything no one keeps.

And there is Selvedge, the tabby cat, the only creature that walks freely across every tab. Selvedge belongs to no one, sits on whatever you're neglecting, and is never wrong.

Core loop

Daily (one weft row):

1. Open the browser; the loom wakes. Tab titles whisper overnight states.
2. Sweep your threads in the order you choose. Order matters: the shuttle picks up and drops carried context as it goes.
3. Inside each tab: a short living vignette (prose + a small woven-pixel scene) with zero to two choice chips, plus whatever the shuttle delivers.
4. Your visit sequence is committed as today's row of weft.

Weekly: the rows render into a Sunday Panel — a woven frieze of the week's true events, bordered in the weave structure you most practiced. A twill week looks twilled. The game weaves a mirror of your habits.

Seasonally: the Fray advances or recedes; town-scale Patterns (quest-like textile goals) resolve; new threads arrive at the station.

Systems

Tab verbs

Closing a tab is never destructive — accidents must not kill townsfolk. Cutting is an intentional rite, and sometimes it is mercy. Threads that end well return a Spindle; spindles are what you spend to spin new people into town. Endings beget beginnings.

The Shuttle (carried context)

The beating heart of the design. The shuttle holds a small stack of carried things — rumors, objects, moods, tunes, contagions — each with a decay ("fades in N passes"). Every tab you pass through can add, transform, or intercept what you carry. Routing is the puzzle:

• Carry the apology directly and it arrives plain; route it through the kiln and it arrives smelling of memory.
• Gossip mutates with every intermediate stop.
• The doctor's tab strips "fever" from the shuttle; the gambler's tab steals anything shiny.
• Some tabs flash for attention. Indulging them has costs. So does resisting.

Weave grammar

Days are rows; your threads are columns (arranged by you on the Loom tab, the game's home). Recurring visit patterns are recognized as real weave structures and named on your cloth:

• Tabby (steady alternation) — stability; resists the Fray.
• Twill (staggered diagonals, e.g. A·B·C, B·C·D) — momentum; relationships deepen in chains.
• Satin (long floats — deliberate long neglect, then return) — drama; reunions, ruptures, revelations.
• Recognized motifs (houndstooth, herringbone…) become town "fashions" and unlock Patterns.

Your habits become visible, consequential cloth. Two players with identical towns will weave utterly different tapestries.

Patterns (quests as textiles)

Goals are expressed as cloth to be woven, not checkboxes: "The Mended Feud — a twill binding Harlan and Prue, seven rows without a dropped stitch." Patterns are diegetic: the priest commissions them, the heretic mocks them, the Fray unpicks them.

The Sunday Panel & the Archive

Every week compiles into a generated SVG frieze — figures, crossings, knots, cuts, cat — in a distinctive woven-pictorial style. Panels stitch into a continuous scrolling tapestry at tabestry.com/t/yourtown. Late-game seasonal threat: the Unpicking, which erodes detail from your oldest panels unless mended — turning your own archive into playable territory and making long-term players custodians of their own history.

Multiplayer: Thread Letters

No lobbies, no leaderboards. A townsperson can be emigrated: sealed, with their entire woven history, into a Thread Letter (a link). A friend opens it and that person steps off the train into their town — carrying grudges, crafts, and memories of a tapestry your friend will never see, and speaking of a Regard that was different there. Characters as gifts, letters as the transport layer. Asynchronous, generous, and unlike any existing multiplayer shape.

Uniqueness audit (prior art, and why this isn't that)

The constraint on this project is originality, so the claim is made auditable:

The defensible novelty is the combination: (1) tabs as inhabitants, (2) attention-sequence as recorded weft with a real textile grammar, (3) the shuttle's carried-context routing puzzle, (4) permanent generated tapestry as save-file-artwork, (5) thread-gifting multiplayer. No shipped game has any two of these, let alone all five.

What this game is not: not an idle clicker, not a gacha, not a Chrome-extension toy, not a horror-meta gimmick, and not the board game.

Feasibility (web platform)

• Cross-tab state: BroadcastChannel + SharedWorker; server is source of truth. Page Visibility API reliably captures the shuttle (focus order) — the design never depends on reading tab-strip position, which the web platform doesn't expose.
• Dim time: advances server-side by wall clock (cron ticks), so background throttling and closed browsers are embraced — slowness is canon.
• Whispers: live document.title updates and canvas-drawn favicons; throttled in background on some browsers, which is acceptable — whispers are whispers. No push notifications, ever, per Pillar 4.
• Stack: Next.js (App Router) on Vercel at tabestry.com; Marketplace Postgres (e.g. Neon) for towns/threads/rows; crons via vercel.ts for dim-time and Fray ticks; Sunday Panels as server-generated SVG.
• Mobile (no real tabs): the Handloom — a single-screen companion view of your threads for visiting and whisper-reading. Full loom play is a desktop-browser ritual, and that's a feature: Tabestry lives where tabs live.
• Accessibility: fully playable with the Tab key (thematically mandatory); prose-first scenes make it unusually screen-reader-friendly for a simulation game; reduced-motion honored.

Risks & open questions

• Gimmick ceiling: if the tab layer is novelty without depth, retention dies. Mitigation: the shuttle/routing puzzle and weave grammar must carry the game even for players who'd play it in one window.
• Cadence tuning: daily rows must forgive missed days (travel, weekends) without making neglect meaningless. Current lean: missed days weave "plain warp" — visible but not punitive; satin reframes neglect as drama.
• Legibility of the weave grammar: textile structures must be taught diegetically (the priest teaches tabby; the tailor teaches twill) or they'll read as horoscope.
• Browser variance: favicon/title behavior differs across Chrome/Firefox/Safari; needs an early compatibility spike.
• Open: how much simulation autonomy vs. authored vignette? Target: authored scene fragments selected and recombined by simulation state — Wildermyth's lesson, applied to a town.

MVP roadmap

1. The Loom (first playable, ~6 weeks): one town, five authored threads, shuttle with carried context, title/favicon whispers, daily rows, one rendered Sunday Panel. Success = testers reorder their real tabs to change the story, unprompted.
2. The Cloth: weave-structure recognition, Patterns, spindle economy, the Fray, the Basket/scissors rites, Selvedge.
3. The Letters: Thread Letter emigration, public tapestry pages at tabestry.com, the Guild (supporter tier: archive mending, dyes, extra spindles — never attention mechanics).

Tabestry is a game about the oldest technology we have for holding people together — attention — played on the newest surface we neglect it on. You will not beat it. You will keep it, and it will keep what you did.