Shared objectives, capped rewards, and no contribution table.
Four thousand two hundred metres of hedge across two thousand players. Everybody who contributes anything at all gets the same reward, nobody can see who did most, and the goal cannot be finished by one person with a credit card.
The goals that run, and how each is built.
| Goal | Target | Runs | What it rewards |
|---|---|---|---|
| The hedgerow goal | 4,200 metres, parish-wide | Winter, every season | Nature units, shared equally |
| The wall goal | 900 metres of dry stone | Winter, alternate seasons | Nature units, and a cosmetic gate |
| Spring cropping | 60 fields drilled in spring rather than autumn | Spring | Coins, capped, and a blackgrass lesson |
| The orchard | 800 trees planted and kept alive for a year | Autumn, then checked | Nature units, awarded a year later |
| Overwintered stubble | 400 hectares left standing until February | Autumn | Scheme income, at the real rate |
| The wet grassland goal | 120 hectares held wet through the spring | Spring, in three parishes only | Nature units, and a very slow cosmetic |
How a parish goal works.
It opens with a target and a window
Parish-wide, seasonal, and sized so that about sixty per cent of parishes finish it.
Anybody can contribute anything
One metre or four hundred. There is no minimum and no requirement to participate at all.
Progress is shown as a total
Never as a table of who did what. There is no contribution ranking anywhere in the design.
It completes, or it does not
A parish that misses it loses nothing. There is no penalty for a failed goal, because a penalty turns a shared objective into a shared obligation.
Everybody who contributed gets the same
Identical reward, regardless of amount. One metre and four hundred metres are rewarded the same, which is the entire design decision.
Why the reward is flat, and why nobody sees the table.
Because a contribution table in a shared goal produces contribution shaming, and contribution shaming produces the guild mechanic that has made co-operative mobile gaming exhausting: the player who did least gets messaged, and the player who did most gets resented.
A flat reward makes participation cheap and refusal costless. It means a player who contributes one metre because that is all they had time for gets exactly what the enthusiast gets, and the enthusiast is not thereby cheated because the enthusiast was going to lay the hedge anyway.
It also removes the only mechanism by which spending could win a parish goal. Nature units cannot be bought, contributions are not ranked, and the cap means a parish of two thousand and a parish of six hundred both finish or both do not, on effort rather than on size.
What a parish table looks like when it is not a contribution table.
Parishes against their own targets, not against each other. Each target is scaled to parish size, so a small parish that finishes is ahead of a large one that did not.
All parishesThis winter
- 01 The Cotswolds Hedgerow goal — 4,200 m target 4,412
- 02 The Dales Hedgerow goal — 3,100 m target 3,240
- 03 The Marches Hedgerow goal — 2,400 m target 2,388
- 04 Your parish — the Fensyou Hedgerow goal — 2,800 m target 2,610
- 05 The Downs Hedgerow goal — 3,000 m target 2,440
- 06 The Wolds Hedgerow goal — 2,200 m target 1,905
This is the only place in the design where one parish appears alongside another, and it compares each against its own target rather than against the others. No individual player appears on it at all.
No contribution table, ever
The game does not show, store or expose who contributed what to a parish goal. Not to other players, not to parish organisers, and not in an end-of-season summary. It is the single most requested feature in every co-operative game of this shape and it is the one that turns them into work.
Parish goals, questioned.
Nothing happens. There is no penalty for a failed goal and no consequence for having contributed nothing, because a shared objective with a penalty attached is an obligation.
No. Targets are scaled to parish size and rewards are capped, so a parish of six hundred and a parish of two thousand face the same difficulty.
No. There is no contribution table anywhere in the design, and there will not be one.
And when it goes wrong, there is a reel.
The game composes a clip of the failure and hands it to you rather than to an algorithm.
