couchslop / Expedition Pack

Pre-order

Expedition Pack

Six historical adventures for the TV. Everyone plays from their phone — and each of you knows something the others don't.

$19 founder price · $29 at launch

Pre-orders open soon

Added as each is finished — the first in March 2027, all six by January 2028. Only one person needs to own it — everyone else just needs a phone. Full refund on request until the first one lands.

Try the free game first

Crystal Ridge Defense runs on the same engine these are built on. No account, no payment — play it tonight and you'll know whether this is for your living room.

How it works

  1. 1

    Put the world on the TV

    Open the adventure on the biggest screen in the room. It shows a four-letter room code and a QR code, and then it becomes the ice, the Moon, or the trail.

  2. 2

    Everyone joins from their phone

    Scan the QR, or go to couchslop.com/play and type the code. Pick a name and you're in — no accounts, no downloads. Not in the room? Share the TV over Zoom or Discord and play along from anywhere.

  3. 3

    You each get a job, and a secret

    The TV shows what the whole room can see. Your phone shows what only you can — your sighting, your cargo, what your instrument says. Getting those into one picture, out loud, before the weather turns, is the game.

The six

They arrive one at a time, in this order. Each unlocks for everyone who pre-ordered on the day it lands — you don't wait for the last to play the first.

  1. The ship Endurance held fast in pack ice at twilight, rigging dark against a violet sky. March 2027

    Endurance

    Co-op survival · Antarctica, 1915

    The ice takes the ship, and a crossing becomes the job of getting twenty-eight men home. Worsley got four sextant sightings in sixteen days and hit an island twenty-five miles wide — each phone holds a fragment of a sighting, and the room has to build the fix while the TV pitches.

    Frank Hurley, 6 January 1915. Photograph public domain; digitisation by the State Library of New South Wales, CC BY-SA 3.0 AU.

  2. Eagle's ascent stage rising above the lunar surface, the Earth small on the black horizon behind it. May 2027

    Eagle

    Split-role crisis · the Moon, 1969

    Three of you fly it, the rest run consoles. The 1202 alarms start, the computer is saturated, the landing site is a boulder field and the fuel call is coming. Crew phones show gauges, console phones show checklists, and neither sees the other.

    Michael Collins, 21 July 1969, from Columbia. NASA — public domain.

  3. Musher Gunnar Kaasen in furs beside his lead dog Balto, 1925. July 2027

    The Serum Run

    Relay race · Alaska, 1925

    Twenty mushers, six hundred and seventy-four miles, fifty below, and diphtheria antitoxin headed for Nome. You run your leg, hand off to the next phone, and then can only watch. Togo ran the hardest stretch; Balto got the statue.

    Gunnar Kaasen and Balto, 21 March 1925. Seattle Post-Intelligencer / Museum of History and Industry — public domain.

  4. Tahitian double-hulled voyaging canoes under carved prows, crowded with crew, painted in oils. September 2027

    Hōkūleʻa

    Hidden-clue navigation · the Pacific, 1976

    Tahiti from Hawai'i with no instruments — stars, swells, birds, the colour of the water. The TV is the sky. Each phone carries one crew member's observations, and not one of them is enough on its own.

    William Hodges, The Fleet of Otaheite Assembled at Oparee, 1774 — public domain. Cook-voyage canoes, not Hōkūleʻa herself: she sailed in 1976 and her photographs are still in copyright.

  5. Studio portrait of Nellie Bly, about 1890, looking directly at the camera in a high-collared jacket. November 2027

    Seventy-Two Days

    Head-to-head race · around the world, 1889

    Nellie Bly chasing a novel's record, against Elizabeth Bisland going the opposite way around the planet. Two teams, opposite directions, real steamship timetables — and you watch the other team's dot coming toward you.

    Nellie Bly, c. 1890, photographer unknown — public domain.

  6. A single file of packers climbing the ice staircase cut into the Chilkoot Pass, 1898. January 2028

    The Ton of Goods

    Co-op logistics · the Klondike, 1897

    The Mounties wouldn't pass you over the Chilkoot without a year's supplies: two thousand pounds, up fifteen hundred steps cut into ice, in relays, before the pass shut for winter. No villain and no dice — just weight, cold, and how you split it.

    Eric A. Hegg, Chilkoot Pass, c. 1898. Museum of History and Industry — public domain.

What makes it different

You get someone's job

Not a player token — a post. You're Worsley with the sextant, or the GUIDO console, or the musher waiting in the dark for the next hand-off. Real people, real assignments, taken from the record.

Your phone holds one piece

What you sighted, what you're carrying, what your instrument says. Nobody gets the whole picture, and the screen on the wall won't give it to you. The only way to assemble one is out loud.

History sets the bar

Every run ends with the ledger: you against the people who actually did it. The Caird made the crossing in sixteen days. You took twenty-four. That's the argument on the way home.

Where this actually stands

None of the six are finished. What exists today is the engine underneath them — the TV board, the phone-as-private-screen wiring, and the balancing tooling — all of which you can go play right now, for free, in Crystal Ridge Defense.

Every picture here is real, and none of them is the game. They're photographs and paintings of the actual journeys — Hurley's plates, Michael Collins' shot of Eagle coming back up, Hegg on the Chilkoot — not concept art commissioned for something that doesn't exist yet. One is period-adjacent rather than literal, and its caption says so: Hōkūleʻa sailed in 1976 and her photographs are still in copyright, so her card carries Cook-voyage canoes from 1774 instead.

You are paying early, and that is the deal. The founder price is lower than launch because you're taking the risk that this takes longer than planned, or ends up different from the descriptions above. If either bothers you, wait — it'll still be here at $29.

If a date slips, you hear it from us first. Everyone who pre-ordered gets mailed when one moves, with a refund offered in the same message. You never have to chase it.

The fine print, in plain words