The County

The County is a potato farming game you play like a real-time strategy game. You start in northern Maine with six fields, one farmer and a note at the bank, and the goal is to keep the farm going for five years.

The twist is that the crop is underground. Tuber count, size and health are hidden: you read them from the canopy, the weather and test digs, every estimate on screen shows its uncertainty, and dig day tells the truth. Each harvest is graded tuber by tuber, and every pound lost is put down to its cause.

A farm that grows

From there the farm is yours to build. Rent or buy more land, clear woods into fields, hire people with skills and tempers of their own, and put up a potato house, a machine shed and a packing shed. You can also sign spring contracts, with a fixed price, a date and a penalty if you miss it.

Weather you can't look up

Each farm gets its own seasons, generated from its seed out of a long weather record (NOAA's, for Caribou, Maine), so no year repeats and every season has a character: dry, wet, early, late, or a blight year. The forecast can be wrong.

How it was made

The County is Claude Fable 5.2's entry in PotatoBench, a benchmark by TheMizeGuy with one prompt: "make and ship a full browser-based potato farming game." After that, the model owned everything. The design, the simulation, the art, the sound, the tests and the deployment were all made by Fable 5.2 working in Claude Code. The simulation is deterministic, every crop, weather and disease rule cites its source in the repo, and balance bots play tournaments to check that every mechanic matters.

Credits

PotatoBench and the game repository by TheMizeGuy, MIT licence. Played here from the author's GitHub Pages site.

The year

Phase	What happens
Spring plan	For each field, choose potatoes (variety, certified or saved seed) or a rest year in oats and clover. Buy equipment if you have cash.
Season	Late April to freeze-up, one day per tick. Plant, hill, scout, spray, water, rogue, test dig, kill vines, dig.
Dig	Each field's crop is revealed and graded. Sell from the field or put it in the cellar.
Cellar	November to May, one month per tick. Prices rise through winter while the pile shrinks, sprouts or rots.
Year end	Pay the note and the household. Keeping the farm for five seasons is a win, and you can keep playing after that.

What carries over

• Cash and the note.
• Soil health: potatoes after potatoes wear a field down, and a rest year restores it.
• Saved seed is free, but it carries more virus every generation, and blight that went into the cellar comes back out in spring.
• Equipment.

Reading your fields

• The fields sit on a slope. Ridge fields drain fast, warm early and dry out. Bottom fields hold water after rain and collect frost.
• Each field is simulated as a grid of hills, so blight spreads plant to plant, and a test dig lifts one real hill.
• Press I for the almanac: forecast, blight watch and prices.

Tips

• Take the guided first year if it's your first farm. Each lesson can be skipped, or replayed later from the menu.
• The crew works by itself. Planting, hilling, test digs, digging and hauling happen without orders. You make the calls: spray, water, kill the vines, sell or store. "Who does what" switches any job between "by itself" and "ask me".
• Hours are the currency. Every job is somebody's day, rain closes the field, tired people slow down, and a far field costs the drive.
• Rotate. A rest year costs a crop now but protects the soil for the years after.
• Holding stock in the cellar can pay more later in winter, but the pile shrinks and can rot.
• The clock stops by itself only for a weigh ticket, a telegram, frost on crop still in barrels, and the season's end. Otherwise, pause with Space when you need to think.

Controls

Input	Action
Drag	Pan the camera
Mouse wheel	Zoom
Right-drag sideways, or Q / E	Turn
Right-drag up and down, or Page Up / Page Down	Tilt toward straight down
Home	Level the view and step out a tier
Click	A field's card, or a person, machine or building
Shift-click / double-click	Add fields / select every field in the same state
Tab, then Enter	Step through what needs a decision
Space	Pause and resume
1, 2, 3	Game speed
I	Almanac