The inbox
Continue stops on the day a letter that needs an answer lands: a story, a disciplinary notice inside its reply window, a question from the press. Once, for that letter. Leaving it unanswered is your call, and the button does not trap you on it.
Stories that mean it
The farm takes him for the fortnight. The summer in Boston is a summer away. A weekend dropped is a weekend in the stand. The squad row says why, the way it does for exams and work.
The wedding falls on the eve of your match and nowhere else, and the player you let dance is not in the fifteen that lines out.
Twenty-nine lines rewritten across the story bank. What happened stays; the knowing last line goes.
The match
Shots go to the player, not the slot. A corner-back moved to corner-forward with a corner-back's boot takes a fraction of the shots the real forward takes, and playing out of position now counts in shot selection as it did in everything else.
Scores spread out from the inside line: about half from the full-forward line, a third from the half-forwards, the rest from midfield and the backs. It was two thirds, a quarter, and next to nothing.
Condition shows on the scoreboard: a player at 70 looks for the shot less and strikes it worse. A match leaves a mark on the week: recovery is slower, so Sunday's toll shows on the jersey until Thursday and a midweek club match shows on Sunday.
Ladies' football's 45 is its own kick, struck off the ground by the long kicker from wherever she stands, and worth two when it goes straight over, as the 2026 playing rules have it. The 65 in hurling and the 45 in football and camogie are the long taker's kicks too, about three a side a match, a point when they carry.
The system
Four more levers on the Tactics screen, each a trade. Half-backs: hold, balanced, or overlap (scores from deep, space behind). Half-forwards: push up, balanced, or drop deep (link the play and help the midfield, fewer shots of their own). Defensive line: high press, standard, or blanket (eleven behind the ball in football under the three-up rule, everybody in hurling and camogie; goals against dry up, and so do your own). Tackling: on the feet, standard, or hard (more ball won, more frees against, and the bin for the ones who go too far). Each brief pays by the players asked to carry it: an overlap runs on the half-backs' legs, a blanket holds on the backs' lungs.
Every county's coach sets those four off his panel the way he sets the rest, and a poor coach gets them wrong too. You can read theirs: the county screen's next-match card and the match-day Tactics board both say how the opposition line out, all eight levers. The coach writes after the match when a brief cost: the overlap that left the wings open, the blanket that starved the attack, the high press beaten for goals, the hard tackling that cost men.
The long-range job is named for what it is in each code: 65s and long frees; 45s and long frees; sideline cuts, 45s and long frees.
The replay
The picture tells the truth about who scored. Every event names its player and, for a score, who set it up, and the play is acted out on their markers: the assister's dot passes, the scorer's dot strikes, a free or a 45 starts at the taker.
Both halves open with the throw-in: the four midfielders at the centre, everyone else behind their own 45 (65 in hurling and camogie), the ball up, one of them wins it. At half-time the sides cross to the changed ends and settle first, and the clock and every play wait until the ball is thrown in.
Hold means hold. The clock's seconds swept on under Hold and a play already under way kept going, its score landing on a paused clock. Now the act freezes where it is, the seconds stop, and both pick up from there on Resume.
A shot that went wide is shown going wide, and the keeper's restart follows it: kickouts in the football codes, puckouts in hurling and camogie, from the small parallelogram. The picture used to skip the shot and go from one restart straight to the other.
Every lever shows on the pitch. The keeper's restart goes where the plan says, a Direct side moves the ball further and faster and a Possession side shorter, a blanket sits the lines deeper and a high press pushes them up, overlapping wing-backs run into the wave and held ones stay home, dropped half-forwards sit nearer the midfield, and a hard-tackling side's presser closes tighter.
The players move with the play. In the football codes the side without the ball drops into its own half bar the three the rule keeps up, and the side with it attacks in a wave, backs and all; hurling and camogie shift less, since a long puck punishes a side that has run up together.
A struck ball flies from boot to beyond the bar in one motion, and a long kick takes longer than a tap-over. A back's pass is a back's pass: the keeper and the six backs kick shorter and never past about fifty metres, unless the side plays Direct. The sliotar is drawn smaller than the football, at about the proportion of the real things.
Reading the screens
Thursday's declaration lands on the Squad screen, where the fifteen and the bench it names are, with the 26 in columns at body size and the signature under them.
Dim text is a shade brighter everywhere, the base text a size larger, and the banner's county name and bainisteoir line sit on a dark footing so a gold or white county's colours never wash them out.
The county screen opens with the fifteen at a glance: strength by line, condition, sharpness and form, and who is out. The Results screen says so when your code did not play on a day the others did. The chosen setting on the Tactics screen reads as amber on the dark rather than a solid amber block.
Note
This changes the world: a new save plays out differently from the same seed. Saves in progress carry on where they were.
The same build is on Windows and Mac.