HalfOpen: Black ICE

Two crews. Two hidden sectors. Break theirs before they break yours.

Black ICE is a duel of hidden information and sharp deduction. Hide five ICE nodes in your sector, then spend your cycles probing your rival's until every one of theirs is broken.

HEAD TO HEAD, NEAR OR FAR Play a friend on their own iPhone or iPad. NEARBY finds someone in the same room. INVITE sends a friend an invitation through Game Center, wherever they are. Your sector never leaves your phone, so neither of you sees the other's ICE until it breaks. If the link drops, one tap invites your rival back and the match carries on where it stopped. When the match ends, both deployments are revealed, and each phone checks every answer it was given.

MADE FOR THE FOLD On iPhone Duo, half-fold the screen and the game becomes a tabletop. Your rival's sector stands up on the raised half to be read, and your own sector and controls lie flat under your hand. Fold, unfold or lay it flat in the middle of a match and nothing is lost.

HOW IT PLAYS • Deploy five ICE nodes, from a two-cell WATCHDOG to a four-cell REVENANT, across an 8×8 sector. • Spend three cycles a turn. A PING reads one cell. A SWEEP reads a cell and its four neighbours, but tells you only how many are occupied, never which. • Overlap your readings and work out what must be where. • Break all five of their nodes to win. Every node of yours that breaks gives you an extra cycle next turn, so whoever is behind always has a way back.

FIVE CORPORATIONS. ONE WAY UP. You start small. DATAMINE ANALYTICS sells everything the city does, dreams included, and cannot imagine anyone bothering to break in. Then POWERGRID DYNAMICS, who engineer NeoLondon's blackouts; SYNAPTIC CORP, who own what the city believes; and EREBUS SYSTEMS, whose ICE has stopped 99.9% of all breaches. Last comes WHITMAN ASSOCIATES LLP, the law firm every corporation keeps on retainer. Nobody has ever broken Whitman. The day someone does, everything it holds comes loose.

CREWS THAT LEARN Every crew hides its ICE its own way, and the higher you climb, the harder they hunt. From SYNAPTIC up, they watch where you deploy: keep hiding in the same places and they will come straight for them. Every break lands on the board with a jolt, yours or theirs, and your record against each corporation is kept in Settings.

EVERY WIN RECOVERS SOMETHING Each win on the ladder pulls a piece of intel out of the corporation you just beat: a citizen's profile, sold on; a blackout schedule; a deepfake brief; a surveillance transcript; a sealed case file. Beat a corporation for the last time and its file decrypts in front of you, its picture written to the screen dot by dot, and tells your crew which corporation to breach next. Fifty pieces to recover, and the INTEL archive keeps every one.

TWO PLAYERS, ONE DEVICE • TABLE: lay one iPhone or iPad flat between two players, with both seats on one screen. • PASS: hand one device back and forth. Every hand-over hides both boards until the next player is ready.

NO STRINGS. NO TRACE. • One purchase. No in-app purchases, no ads, no tracking. Black ICE collects no data. • Plays offline against the computer, or two people on one device. • Supports Dynamic Type, VoiceOver and Reduce Motion. • A match against the computer or on one device is saved as you play, so a phone call never costs you a game.

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