Charterbound: Into the Margins

Charterbound: Into the Margins is a game you can play or watch. Until October 2026 it was called The Unwritten Kingdom.

You play Rex, a bookbinder in a kingdom that runs on the written word, where the ink is fading. Letters, maps, and laws are going blank, including his town’s charter, and without a charter the town can’t build anything. Rex can bind a new one if he can find the materials. Finding them takes him out into the wilds, where something is drinking the kingdom’s ink.

Meanwhile, his towns are full of people living their own lives. Each one has a name, a home, a job, and a daily routine, and they make friends, fall out, fall in love, marry, and raise children whether or not Rex is around. So do the monsters. You can follow the story, get sidetracked by the towns, or put the controller down and watch.

Play it in your browser → It’s free, with no account, and your game stays in your browser.

Getting started

Choose New Game. A few cards tell you what’s happening to the kingdom, and Rex wakes up in his bindery in Brindlewick. His ink has gone pale, and only a few notebooks are left on his shelves. You can begin as Rex, or watch the town go about its day first. Press V (or tap Back) to take over as Rex whenever you like.

Your first job is to find Mayor Quill on the square, just outside Rex’s door. The mayor will send you out to gather what the first charter takes: 3 Ink from inkcap mushrooms, 3 Paper from paperleaf bushes, and 2 Thread from flax, all growing in the woods and meadows around town. Stand on or beside a plant and press E to gather from it. It grows back in time. Bring everything home, bind the Charter of Works at the bench in Rex’s front room, and take it to the mayor. That mends the east bridge and lets you choose the town’s first new building and where it goes. Old Mags, also on the square, is worth a chat too.

A few things worth knowing from the start:

• The clock. A day takes ten minutes of play, from 6am to 6am, with the time at the top right. Shops keep their own hours, and homes lock at night. Brindlewick’s first Harvest Fair is on day 6.
• Saving. The game saves when Rex sleeps in his own bed, through the inner door at the back of his workshop. Sleeping also skips to the morning. Anything since he last slept is lost if you quit.
• Falling. If the monsters get the better of Rex, he wakes up in his workshop bed with a quarter of his coins gone. Falling doesn’t save.
• The Journal (Q) keeps the story’s next step on its first page, and what’s going on today, who’s who, and the town news on the others.
• The keys. Press H to show or hide a list of keys beside the picture.

Controls

On a computer you play with the keyboard. The mouse works in every menu, and a gamepad works too.

To do this	Press
Move	Arrows or WASD
Swing the bone folder (hold to poke)	Space, J, or Z
Talk, pick up, use, choose	E or Enter
Map (Left and Right for other counties)	M
Inventory	I
Journal	Q
Towns ledger	L
Make camp and watch the towns	V
Take a photo	B
Switch between 3D and Classic	T
Show or hide the keys	H
Sound on or off	N
Menu and settings	Esc

While you’re watching the towns:

To do this	Press
Speed time up (up to twenty times)	Space
Choose what the camera looks for	C
People and places to follow	F, or click someone
Next person here	Enter
Next town	Tab
Let the towns grow on their own	G
Look around	Arrows
Back to Rex	V

On a phone, hold it sideways. A d-pad sits on the left, and on the right are a hand to talk and use things and Rex’s bone folder to swing (hold it to poke). Small MENU, MAP, 3D, and FULL (full screen) buttons sit above them, and everything else is in the menu. Tap a choice once to pick it out and again to choose it. On an iPhone, Share and then Add to Home Screen plays it full screen, like an app.

With a gamepad, move with the d-pad or left stick. A talks and uses, B or X swings (B also backs out of menus), Y opens the inventory, Select the map, and Start the menu. The shoulder buttons turn the Journal’s pages.

Saving

There’s one game at a time. Your town’s square plays behind the title screen at the hour you last saved, and Continue walks Rex back up to his door. New Game asks before it replaces the game you have.

Your game lives in the browser you play it in, so clearing that browser’s site data clears it. To keep a copy, or to move your game to another browser or device, use Save File on the title screen to save it to a file, and load that file in the other browser.

Playing it

The kingdom is four counties, each with a town in trouble. Brindlewick’s words are fading. Rimeholm is frozen and silent, Cinderford’s Great Archive is smouldering, and Mudhollow is sinking into the swamp while bookworms eat its books. Rex heads out screen by screen through meadows, snowfields, lava fields, and bogs, fighting off monsters with his bone folder and gathering what each county’s charters need: ink, paper, and thread to start with, and rarer things further out. Each county has three story charters to bind, and after those, as many town charters as you can gather for.

Each county has a boss behind the trouble: the Blot, Hush, the Cinder Drake, and the Bookworm Queen. Every one of them has a trick you have to work out. Beneath the lakes lies the Unwritten, an underworld where every lost word drains, with a town of lost words of its own and five more bosses below that.

It’s a hard game. The bosses take a few tries, and some of the roads between towns are dark, tangled, and full of monsters, with nothing on the screen to point the way. The map marks where the story wants you next, and the townsfolk will tell you a fair bit if you ask. The Tavern is good for gossip. When a road is too much, gather and build for a while, and come back with more hearts and a stronger bone folder.

Rex’s towns

Back in town, Rex binds what he’s found into a charter at his bench and takes it to the mayor. Each charter opens the next part of the story and lets the town grow, and you choose what gets built and where. Placement matters, because people care about their neighbours: a family likes living next to a garden or a school, and not next to a noisy tavern.

Nothing goes up overnight. A charter marks out a building site, and the town’s builders, grown-ups with no other job, put it up over the next few days, slower if they’re short of hands. Rex can lend them a hand for an hour. After four, the bolder children climb on the sites, dare each other, hide, and build forts in the timber, and now and then a grown-up walking by catches them at it. Now and then one of them falls, or knocks over a stack and sets the building back a day.

As a town fills up, it spreads into new quarters, and its streets get cobbles, benches, lamps, and a well. Households have their own money and their own furniture, which they order from the Carpenter, who carries it over through town. Families move house, and sometimes move to another town with a handcart.

Rex also keeps a shop in every town. He makes notebooks, journals, and other wares at his bench, in plain, cloth, leather, clasped, or gilt bindings, and sets them out on his shelves. In time he writes books of his own. Townsfolk come in and buy what suits them. The happier a town is, and the more its people read, the more they buy. His workshops outside Brindlewick stay closed until he opens them at the till.

The monsters

The monsters live their own lives too. There are about three hundred of them, each with a name, a family, and an age, and they’re born, grow up, and grow old. Each kind lives in dens and keeps its own hours, and Rex can climb down into the bigger dens. A monster Rex beats is gone for good.

Rex can talk to them. Once he’s met one, its name shows over its head, and over the days it gets to know him. Some stay angry, and some become friends. The Journal’s Beasts page keeps track of every kind he’s met.

Monsters eat what grows on the land, and some eat each other. When they’re hungry, or a town’s hunters have killed too many of them, they raid the town at night. A den with a grudge can keep coming back, until the town asks Rex to do something about it.

Watching it

Five towns run on their own clock. People go to work and school, run errands, visit friends, and head out in the evening. Each has two personality traits and a mood that comes from their home, their neighbours, their friends, and their town. Unhappy people sulk and eventually move away. Couples ask Rex to bind their marriage licence, and later a Name Book for a baby. Children grow up. Rex can court anyone he’s become good friends with, marry, and start a family of his own.

The towns have plenty going on. There are market days with haggling and a busker on the square, and children’s games after school. Every town has its own bar and can build its own stage. A night at Brindlewick’s Tavern might bring a sing-song, arm-wrestling, a storyteller, or a round bought for a birthday or a new baby. Each town also has a festival every four weeks, and once the right building is up, one special evening of its own every week.

Press V and Rex makes camp where he is. You can watch him cook, read, mend, or sleep by his tent, but mostly the camera roams the towns. It looks across the whole kingdom for what’s worth seeing (a raid, a festival, Rex’s family, a Tavern night) and says in a caption what it’s found. Press C to tell it what to look for first, or F to follow anyone you like through their day. You can also speed time up, and if you like, let the towns grow on their own: once Rex has finished a town’s part of the story, its clerk writes charters from what the town has gathered, and the town chooses what to build.

3D or Classic

The game starts out in Classic, flat pixel art seen from above. Press T (or tap 3D) for the 3D view, where the same pixel people stand up in a tilted world, with sunlight and shadows, falling snow, and the camera following Rex smoothly from screen to screen. Settings has a sharper version of the 3D view too. You can switch any time, even on the title screen.

Photos

Press B to save a photo of whatever’s on the screen. The game also takes its own photos of big moments, like a wedding, a new baby, a fair’s winner, a boss beaten, or a new monster met, and keeps them on the Journal’s Album page. You can mark your favourites and save any of them to keep.

Generations

Rex doesn’t stay young. After a few months in the game he goes grey and slows down, and when you’re ready, he writes his memoir at the bench and hands the workshops over to one of his grown children (or a child he’s adopted, or a close friend). The new Rex carries on the story where the old one left it. Old Rex retires to a house in town, where you can drop in for a cup of tea. The townsfolk grow old too, and retire to the seaside, and new families move into their homes.

Where it runs

Charterbound plays in the browser on a computer, with a keyboard, a mouse in the menus, or a gamepad, and on a phone held sideways, with touch controls.

Charterbound: Into the Margins is © 2026 Eric Shay Howard. All rights reserved.

Log

• October 17, 2026: Renamed the game Charterbound: Into the Margins, since the App Store already has games with “Unwritten” in their names. Buildings now go up over a few days on building sites, and children play on them after school. Rewrote this page as a guide to playing, with new screenshots.
• October 14, 2026: The first big update: a 3D view, monsters with names, families, dens, and raids of their own, a watch camera that finds what’s worth seeing, towns that grow into cities, furniture and back rooms, and photos.
• October 12, 2026: Put the game online and wrote this page. Marked the game all rights reserved, on its title screen and in its files.