A real district, sixty seconds, and a fleet of fictional franchises with expansion plans. Squash them before the block goes gray.
Every dot is the real footprint of an independent place. Gray franchises will land and convert whatever they touch — tap them before their ring closes. Save the block.
Chainbreak doesn’t generate its levels. Each board is the true footprint of independent places in one district of a real city — the densest cluster of cafés, restaurants, record shops, vintage stores and galleries in the Pin Reef data, plotted exactly where they stand. The dots are anonymised (no names, no addresses, no scale), but the shape is the city’s own: the long spine of a market street, the knot around a square, the thinning at the river. Players who know their city tend to recognise their district before the first franchise lands.
The game compresses a slow process into sixty seconds. In real districts the ring closes over years, not seconds: a rent rise, a landlord who prefers a franchise’s guarantee, a tourist flow that rewards recognisable logos over particular rooms. Independent places rarely lose on quality — they lose on lease terms. The defence, outside the game, is unglamorous: spend money in the places that make a street worth walking, and know where they are before the window changes.
One district is featured each day, and every city is playable any time. The named, mapped versions of the places on each board — with the chains already filtered out — live in the city volumes:
A free 60-second arcade game. Gray franchises land on a city district and start converting the independent places around them; tapping a franchise before its ring closes squashes it. The score is how much of the block is still standing when the clock runs out. New featured district every day.
Yes — each board is the true footprint of independent places in one district of a real city, drawn from the same hand-picked data behind the Pin Reef maps. The dots are anonymised (no names, no addresses, no scale), so the board shows the shape of a neighbourhood without exposing any real place.
No. Every invader — MegaBrew, BurgerPlex, LatteCorp and colleagues — is fictional. No real company is depicted or implied. The game dramatises a real pattern, not a real brand.
Triage. A franchise landing in a dense cluster threatens two places at once; one landing on an empty corner threatens nothing. Guard the clusters, let the outliers go, and accept that the last fifteen seconds are meant to be unfair.
All invading brands are fictional · board shapes from real, anonymised pin data · also playable: Trap or gem?