Reckoner Brass Engine

Numbers are the machine. Reckoner is an idle instrument built from a stack of odometer number-wheels, each a position in a base-N counting column. Your engines feed ticks into the bottom wheel; when a wheel fills to the working base it CARRIES one unit up to the wheel above — a visible brass flip — and every carry mints reckonings.

The trick is that higher wheels are worth exponentially more. A carry into the top place is worth base raised to that place, so a tall, well-fed stack pays enormous sums per turn. Managing your portfolio of columns and bases is the whole game: raise the base and each wheel takes longer to fill, but the per-carry payoff climbs even faster. Add columns to extend the register. Grind the governors — mainspring tension, escapement polish, the fly governor, ivory bearings — to drive the whole chain harder.

Every readout is live: per-column carry rates, tick rate, mint-per-carry, lifetime totals, and a scrolling carry tape logging each wheel that just turned. It reads like a scientific instrument because it is one.

When lifetime output is high enough, Recalibrate strips the engine to its frame, banks permanent BEARINGS — each lifts all output by 15% forever — and unlocks a higher working base to climb again.

It runs while you're away: the engine keeps carrying for up to ten hours and pays you on return.

• A base-N carry-column economy — positional notation made into a game
• Odometer wheels flip and carry; higher places pay exponentially more
• Change the base to trade carry speed for a bigger per-carry payoff
• Dense live readouts: per-column rates, totals, and a scrolling carry tape
• Idle-friendly: the engine reckons offline and pays you on return
• Recalibrate prestige banks permanent bearings and raises your base
• Fully offline, no account, nothing collected

Set the base. Turn the wheels.