At 12:18 UTC today a player put two cards together, Accident and Euphemism, and New Science made them a third. It is called Incident, and it is the fifty thousandth card in the game.
Nobody wrote that joke. There is no writers' room. A player combines cards they are holding, the game works out on the spot whether the pair makes anything, and if nobody in the world has made it before then it is created, illustrated and filed under their name for good. The picture at the top of this page did not exist before lunch. It shows a room of people having the worst afternoon of their professional lives, which is the correct illustration for the word.
What you get for it
Every ten thousandth card sets off a celebration. The player who found it receives a thousand credits and a commemorative card, and for the next 24 hours everybody in the game earns triple, plus a hundred credits simply for turning up.
This time the commemorative card is a Pentagon: five sides for five ten-thousands. It follows a Triptych at thirty thousand and a Quad Bike at forty. It is granted for the occasion and is not for sale. We are giving some thought to sixty.
Four minutes after winning it, the player combined the Pentagon with Military Strategy and got a War Room. We would like to stress that the game did that by itself.
Ten thousand of them in three weeks
The fortieth thousand landed on 25 August, so players have added ten thousand things since, at a little under five hundred a day. Earlier the same morning somebody made a Golden Rule out of Gold and an Idiom.
The game is not finished. It is not even released. The full version arrives in March 2027.
About New Science
New Science is a game about discovery through combination. You start with five cards, put two or three together, and the game engine works out on the spot whether they make something. If they do, and nobody has ever made it before, the card is created and illustrated there and then, and your name goes on it permanently.
Progress runs through sixteen historical ages, from the Stone Age to the Age of Intelligence. Seasons run for several weeks, and each one carries leaderboards, per-season goals, trading between players, and clans.
The demo is available and the full Windows release follows in March 2027. The game is playable in seven languages.