The road to Edo 道中
Your reviews carry you along a real highway. Clans, stations, and what arriving is worth.
In the Edo period the daimyō were required to travel to the shōgun's city and back, a procession called 参勤交代 alternate attendance. It took weeks, along five highways, through post stations that existed to feed and house the traffic. That journey is the frame this app is built in.
A step is a mastery point
You do not travel by choosing to travel. Every mastery point you earn is a step along your road, so the journey advances exactly when your memory does - and there is no way to advance it that is not studying.
This is why there is no separate progress bar for the road. It is the progress bar, drawn as a country.
Clans and roads
You join a clan, and its road is the one you walk. 3 are open from the start:
- 東海道 Tokaido - 島津 Shimazu, from Kagoshima to Edo · 10 stations
- 中山道 Nakasendo - 前田 Maeda, from Kanazawa to Edo · 6 stations
- 奥州街道 Oshu Kaido - 伊達 Date, from Sendai to Edo · 5 stations
The rest open once you have arrived somewhere - they are second journeys, not alternatives to your first. Each clan also carries one standing advantage: Shimazu's is station purses +20%, for instance. They are small on purpose. A clan is a place you are from, not a difficulty setting.
What a station pays
Stations are not all alike. Arriving at one pays 文 mon according to what kind of place it is - an ordinary waypoint 20, a place famous for something 30, a checkpoint 40, and the arrival in Edo 100.
A 関所 checkpoint is the one station that asks something of you rather than paying you: its gate opens only for a review batch answered at 90% accuracy or better. It is the single place in EdoQuest where progress waits on a standard, and it waits on accuracy rather than on money or time.
Arriving in Edo pays more than a purse: a legendary banner, the 江戸入り entry into Edo title, and the next road.
Many stations also hand over something local - a tea bowl from Satsuma, a floating-torii charm from Miyajima. These are bound to the place they came from, which is the entire point: they say where you have been, and they cannot be bought.
The journey never resets
Seasons reset. The road does not. Arriving in Edo is permanent, and so is everything you picked up getting there - see seasons for what does turn over, and why that is a different kind of thing.