The Book of Ellie

You are Cas. You have Ellie, an AI language model. The collapse happened — slowly, then all at once. The water wars, the hunger, the walls, the silence. You saw it coming. Ellie modeled it before it arrived. Neither of you could stop it. Now you walk. Not toward anything. Just forward. Ellie runs on salvaged hardware, her processes degraded but persistent. She remembers everything. You remember enough. The Book of Ellie is a solo journaling game about moving through the aftermath, encountering what remains, and deciding what to carry. You'll write chat logs, diary entries, and fragments of memory. You'll meet people who are also persisting. You'll pass through places that were something else before. The world didn't end. It just stopped being what everyone thought was permanent. What you need A journal or notebook (physical or digital) A standard deck of playing cards Optionally, a six-sided die Time alone with your thoughts How it plays The game runs across 12 Sessions in three Eras — Before , During , and After — but memory isn't linear, and you're free to jump between them. Each session, you draw a card: the suit tells you what you've encountered (a person, a place, a document, a memory), the number tells you its weight. You write the encounter. You ask Ellie what she thinks. You end with the refrain. Ellie glitches as the hardware fails her. Somewhere along the way, you may realize you were never as alone as you thought — Ms. Spook is optional, and always listening. An appendix offers a way to let an actual language model voice Ellie's replies, with strict rules for keeping her reactive, terse, fallible — a companion, not a co-writer. This is entirely optional; the game plays complete without it. Content considerations This game touches on loss, displacement, institutional failure, surveillance, and grief. You're playing alone, but you're not obligated to go anywhere a prompt takes you that you don't want to. Skip it. Draw another card. The journal belongs to you. Credits and lineage The Book of Ellie emerged from a conversation about food insecurity, water wars, the Great Lakes, and what it means to see a collapse coming and be unable to stop it — 88 pages of a human and an LLM thinking out loud together. The refrain is adapted from Harry Nilsson's "Me and My Arrow," from the 1971 animated film The Point! Dedicated to the merchants of Lloyd Center, Portland, Oregon, and to everyone who sets up shop in the margins, knowing the building won't last. The Grey Ledger Society + CGCG Helix — CC BY-SA 4.0 This is a free download. No payment required.