Command from inside the story.
You are physically present with one expedition party. Other parties travel beyond your sight. Their reports can be delayed, their estimates wrong, and their return uncertain.
The map is where your beliefs accumulate: routes, camps, caches, corrections, warnings and places where someone should have been by now. By the end, the chart tells the story of your decisions.
History sets the starting point.
The first scenario begins with the Franklin expedition’s abandonment of its ships in 1848. The design asks what might follow from different decisions, with consequences emerging from the simulation.
The same work that makes the public atlas possible provides the game’s map: period coastlines, period names, and uncertainty that belongs to the chart. Later knowledge must be identified before it can be hidden from the player.