Building The Chart Room

How JabMed Media’s third browser game became pocket Sudoku that inks in pirate treasure maps — and why it talks to Plankwalk.

The Chart Room is the third free browser game from JabMed Media: pocket Sudoku on a midnight-gold chart table. Each solved board inks in a piece of a stolen map.

Play: /play/chart-room/. Catalog: game page.

Why not another hangman

Plankwalk and Critical Mass already share a letter-guessing spine. A third hangman would have been easy and thin. The Chart Room keeps the studio habits — short sessions, a daily, mobile play, one home on this site — and changes the verb. You place numbers. A scrap of chart appears. The voyage is the hook, not a timer.

Widow’s Wake

The first campaign is a Plankwalk voyage.

Rum Cay — four 4×4 boards; the coastline
Widow’s Reef — six 6×6 boards; wreck and sharks
Black Wake — six harder 6×6 boards; the X

The first run is authored. Sail again mints new unique ciphers for the same isles. Daily Cipher is one shared 9×9 for the UTC day, with its own nameless scrap that opens box by box.

Spyglass that teaches

Hints do not just fill a cell. The spyglass says why: only 4 fits here, or 4 can only live in this row. That is the difference between a skip button and a cipher.

Studio handshake

Finish Widow’s Wake on this device and Plankwalk can read a local Cartographer stamp. No shared wallet, no cloud merge — just a medal and a title waiting on the main deck. Music beds are borrowed from Plankwalk packs (Suno Pro @JoeyJabs22). Map plates and the ending chart were generated with Grok Imagine; the last push-in on the cache was a Higgsfield clip.

Stack

Vite + TypeScript, same family as Plankwalk. The board is CSS so the numbers stay exact. Play ships as a static build under /play/chart-room/ next to the other titles.

The cabin now keeps a log of isle scraps, stamps Dry Ink for a clean chart, and tracks a daily streak. The voyage stays pocket-sized; the daily is the hard board.

Why it stays pirate

A second campaign in a lab coat was the obvious follow-up on paper. In the cabin it diluted the place. Critical Mass already owns the science table. Protocol Charts now lives there as the lab floor plan you ink by stabilizing terms — not as Sudoku in teal. The Chart Room stays midnight gold: stolen maps, Widow’s Wake, one Cartographer stamp.

What is next

Another sea chart if the first voyage earns it. Until then the cabin stays open. Feedback is welcome through the contact page.