Every block, as it grows

What your blocks build.

Every dollar fed to a block is height, and height is rank. Move the figure and watch the building it buys. Every picture on this page is drawn one block at a time by the renderer the city itself runs on, in the city's own light, so what you see here is what gets built.

Reading the board…

Claim your block · $1

Claiming takes your link and gives you a lot. Every dollar after that is a fund, in whole dollars, on your own block or anybody else's.

$25 · Shopfront

The whole ladder

One block at nine amounts. The shape changes in whole bricks, so these are the nine steps that look different from each other.

And what the seat buys

The building is the part you can see from the other side of the island. It is not the only thing the money buys.

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Traffic, counted

Your block links out to your site everywhere it is named: in the rankings, on the crown card, on its own card. Every click is counted and shown beside your score. What a seat costs is public, so what it returns is public too.

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Reach

On the opening frame the crown is the only name on the island. Every rank below it has to be zoomed into before it is named at all, and arrives quieter than the ones above it. Rank buys reach, and reach is the point of a name on a map.

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The crown

Pass the leader and you take seat 0, the middle of the island, with the beacon over it. Matching a score does not pass it. Only #1 decays, at a flat rate: enough that the centre has to be kept, not so much that nobody wants it.

Start with a hut.

A block costs $1, and that dollar is your starting score. The lot is yours, your site's own brand goes on it, and everything after that is height.

Claim your block · $1

Whole dollars only. Placement is delivered instantly and is non-refundable. Only the #1 block decays. Everyone else keeps their score, and nobody ever falls off the board.

claim.town — claim.town is a city of 400 blocks, each one somebody's website. $1 claims a block and starts your tower; every dollar after that adds height and walks it toward the middle, where visitors look first and click through.What a score buildsA block's flagship is 1.6 × the square root of its score in dollars, in whole courses of brick, and it stops growing at $500. After that the money spends on width instead, so a rich block reads as a dense downtown lot rather than a taller pin. Every picture on this page is that rule drawn by the renderer the city itself draws with.

$1 · Cottage. 2 courses tall, 3 bricks wide, 0 setbacks, 1 building standing on the lot. The founding price: a hut on a claimed lot, a door facing the street, and your logo over it on the map.

$10 · Cottage. 5 courses tall, 3 bricks wide, 0 setbacks, 2 buildings standing on the lot. Five courses now, and the first outbuilding turns up beside it. The lot has started to fill in.

$25 · Shopfront. 8 courses tall, 3 bricks wide, 1 setback, 3 buildings standing on the lot. It becomes a shopfront. Glass at street level, an awning over it and a sign board above that.

$50 · Shopfront. 11 courses tall, 3 bricks wide, 1 setback, 6 buildings standing on the lot. Eleven courses, and half the lot is built: six buildings now, with the flagship still the face of it.

$100 · Mid-rise. 16 courses tall, 4 bricks wide, 2 setbacks, 9 buildings standing on the lot. A banded mid-rise with corner pilasters, stepping inward twice as it rises. Every sub-lot is built.

$250 · Mid-rise. 25 courses tall, 5 bricks wide, 2 setbacks, 9 buildings standing on the lot. Wider on the ground and twenty-five courses up, with a band course lifted out of the wall every sixth one.

$500 · Tower. 36 courses tall, 6 bricks wide, 2 setbacks, 4 buildings standing on the lot. The height cap: thirty-six courses, the tallest a block is ever drawn. It is wide enough now to stand on its own outbuildings, and four are left.

$2,000 · Downtown block. 36 courses tall, 7 bricks wide, 2 setbacks, 1 building standing on the lot. Height stopped at the cap, so this went sideways instead. A brick wider on every side, and the outbuildings have gone under it.

$5,000 · Downtown block. 36 courses tall, 8 bricks wide, 2 setbacks, 1 building standing on the lot. Eight bricks wide, filling its lot to the kerb. One downtown mass, and the widest a block is ever drawn.

$1 claims a block and becomes its starting score. 386 of 400 seats are open. Claim one.