Survey a nineteen-hex basin, take what the ground grows, and build until you have somewhere to live.
Nobody has written any of this down. That is the job.
Nineteen hexagons in a basin, and thirteen of them you can stand on. Open water closes the northeast and standing rock closes two corners, so the shape of the ground is the first problem you are given — the eastern marsh touches the rest of the region at a single edge, and reaching it means the long way round the south.
Six directions, and no north. The terrain is visible from the first moment, because choosing a route is meant to be something you do with your eyes. What is standing on any tile is not visible, and you find that out by walking onto it.
Cut timber, strip cord, dig clay out of the wet. You can carry sixteen units and a hut costs forty-two, so somewhere in the middle you stop exploring and start hauling. Nothing here respawns, nothing resets between sittings, and the map is the save file.
Tesserae started as a question about somebody else's game. Gravebound dealt a square-room dungeon out of authored files, and I wanted to know what it would cost to make the rooms hexagons instead. The answer was cheap in the place I expected it to be expensive: square rooms need a separate tile drawn for every combination of doorways, and hexagons need one picture per terrain, because nothing has to line up across an edge.
Everything is still a file — the ground, the things standing on it, the ladder of what can be built, and the rules the Game Master follows. Movement is arithmetic on two axial coordinates, identical for every tile on the board, which matters because the GM works out its neighbours in its head on every single move.
The art is late-nineties: pre-rendered and flattened to a fixed palette, dithered rather than blurred, and lit by one sun from the upper left so a prop dropped onto the map is lit the same way as the ground under it.