We are six structural engineers at a small firm in Sacramento. We design the parts of buildings you are not supposed to notice. At noon, we blow each other up.

The game is Scorched Earth, Wendell Hicken's shareware artillery game for DOS, version 1.5. Two or more tanks sit on a landscape the computer makes up fresh every round. You set an angle and a power, you account for the wind, and you fire. The landscape deforms. Tanks fall into craters. People are hurt, in the sense that tanks are, and in the sense that feelings are. The game calls itself the Mother of All Games. We have checked this claim against several other games and found it to be within tolerance.

The machine is a 386 with a VGA card and a fourteen-inch monitor that used to be our CAD station in 1992. It now lives on the counter in the break room between the microwave and the coffee maker. It runs DOS, Scorched Earth, and nothing else. The keyboard gets passed hand to hand around the table. The arrow keys have lost their letters.

My name is Eddie Bentley. I am 39. My tank is LIVE LOAD. I keep the standings, because I am the one who wrote the spreadsheet, and that is how things get assigned around here.

1. A league lunch is ten rounds. Starting cash and all game settings are as saved on the disk in the drawer marked LEAGUE. Do not change the settings. If you need to change the settings, you need a different lunch.

2. Wind is on. Always. Wind is a real load. We design for it every day. We can play with it at noon.

3. No Death's Head before round five. Adopted 1996, after a stretch in which every lunch opened with a Death's Head and nobody had any fun for the next nine rounds.

4. Tunneling counts. If you dig out the ground under another tank and it falls and dies, that is your kill. See the Hall of Fame, "The Basement," for the case that settled this.

5. Four players minimum for a league lunch. Three or fewer is a practice lunch and does not count.

6. No instruments. No protractors, scales, straightedges, or fingers held against the monitor glass. Calculation in your head is permitted. Calculation on paper is permitted if you can do it before the person next to you takes the keyboard away from you.

7. No computer tanks in league play. They are for practice and for humbling.

8. Lunch ends at 12:55. A round in progress at 12:55 is played out. A new round may not be started at 12:54.

9. The principal of the firm is subject to all rules. He has asked for this to be stated in writing. It is now in writing.

LP lunches played · RW rounds won · RW% rounds won out of rounds played · LW lunches won (most rounds that lunch, outright)

CHECK: 175 league lunches this year, 1,750 rounds. 1,655 rounds were won by somebody. In the other 95 nobody survived, which happens more than you'd think and is entirely the fault of the Funky Bomb. Of the 175 lunches, 122 were won outright and 53 ended tied for most rounds and were split. 1,655 + 95 = 1,750. 122 + 53 = 175. We are engineers. We check the totals.

Twelve more workdays this year had three or fewer of us in the office (site visits, plan check, the flu in February), and those were practice lunches.

DEAD LOAD is our senior engineer. He is sixty-one and has been designing tilt-up warehouses since before some of us were born. He does not talk during the game. He does not talk much outside of it. He looks at the wind number, he looks at the screen for a while, and then he fires once and something stops existing. He has led the league every year since 1996. We have asked how. He says he has been estimating trajectories since the Army, and that it is the same as estimating anything else: get close, then correct.

THE ROSTER. We go by our tank names on this page, because the firm's clients can read, too.

LIVE LOAD (me): varies, unpredictable, occasionally excessive.
DEAD LOAD: constant, permanent, always there.
REBAR: our youngest, 27, two years out of school. Good in tension.
CANTILEVER: overextends.
SHEAR WALL: our lateral guy. Defensive. Buys more shields than anyone in the history of the game.
THE PRINCIPAL: his name is on the door. He plays when he is not at a client lunch. He has never won a league lunch at a client lunch.