It is 194 CE. Cao Cao has marched east to make war in Xu and left his home province starving, restless and a week from revolt. You are a junior officer with a borrowed horse. Walk the roads, question the people you meet, fight bandits, level up — and find out that the sword is the weakest tool you carry. Type what you want to do, or tap it on a phone. Free, no install, no account; your story saves itself in this browser.
This is an interactive text novel, played the way the classic MUDs were. Move with n s e w, look around, talk to anyone you meet, then type a keyword to ask them about it. Highlighted words in what people say are keywords you can take to someone else — that is how the story unfolds. attack fights one round at a time, rest passes the day and heals, and help lists everything. Type save for a code you can paste into any browser to carry on later.
Every task in the chapter is something that really decided the fate of Yan Province. Refugees settled on empty land as garrison farms (tuntian) fed Cao Cao's armies for a generation. The Qingzhou Yellow Turbans surrendered to him in 192 CE because he could feed them, and became the core of his army. In 194 CE, when Chen Gong invited Lü Bu into Yan, only three cities held — the ones where Xun Yu and Cheng Yu had kept the magistrates loyal. Then the locusts came, both armies starved at Puyang, and Cao Cao nearly sold his independence to Yuan Shao for one winter's grain.
You can win by force. The ending will tell you what it cost, and why the historical line worked better.
Chapter 1 is three acts of about twenty minutes each, and every act ends with its own debrief, so one act fits one lesson. Every act can be opened on its own with a ready-made character: link students straight to Act 1 (?act=yan-1), Act 2 (?act=yan-2) or Act 3 (?act=yan-3). Players who go on carry their own character and province from act to act. It needs no login and stores nothing about the player on a server — progress lives in the browser, or in a save code the student can copy. The chapter follows the year 194 CE, folding in the Yellow Turban surrender of 192. For the whole eighteen-year campaign as a strategy game, play Three Kingdoms.