About Ekene
A game about Nigerian roads that started as a notebook about Nigerian markets, and took seven years to get built.
Ekene is a cosy game about running a transport business across Nigeria. You start with one donkey and a single free route between two small towns. If you are patient, you finish with a fleet of night buses crossing 61 cities. It is made by one person, and this page is the honest account of where it came from.
The 2019 notebook
The first version of this game was written down in March 2019. It was not about buses. It was about markets — buying goods cheaply in one town, carrying them somewhere they were scarce, and selling them for more. The notes describe donkey carts and lorries and, eventually, planes. They describe market fees, and the title of Omu of a market, and the rule that you lose that title if you neglect the market for too long. They describe a leaderboard for whoever built the largest empire.
Then nothing happened for seven years. That is the part of a project's history that usually gets tidied out of the telling, so it is worth stating plainly: the idea sat in a notebook for most of a decade before a single line of it was built.
What it became
The game that exists now kept the spine of the 2019 notes and changed almost everything on top of it. Goods still move between cities and still pay more where they are scarce. But the centre of the game turned out to be the vehicles and the road, not the market stall — so the market mechanics were pushed to a later phase, and the fleet moved to the front.
You begin with a donkey, or a camel if you start in the north, because beginning with a bus would skip the part where you have nothing. From there the ladder runs through okada and keke, up to the danfo, the gwongworo, the molue, the night bus and the luxury coach — fifteen vehicles, each with a range that decides which cities you can actually serve. Distance on the map is real. Sokoto to Calabar is the far side of a country away, and your donkey is not going.
The cargo is real too. Regional goods, animals, market traders, and the occasional passenger who is not a passenger at all. The economy is anchored to the naira, so the numbers feel like Nigerian numbers rather than the tidy 99-cent figures most games use.
Who Ekene is
Ekene Transport is the blue-and-white bus company that already runs every route on the map before you arrive. It is not a villain and it cannot be beaten in any final sense. It exists so that the roads are never empty, and so that every player begins as the small operator taking on the established giant of the road.
How it is made
Ekene is operated by Nsogbu LLC and built by Lotanna Igwe-Odunze, working alone. It runs in the browser on Phaser 3, saves to the cloud with a free account so a game survives a lost phone, and is released in numbered versions rather than pushed live whenever something changes.
The design has been shaped throughout by a small group of early players who found bugs, lost progress, argued about pricing, and renamed their vehicles after real routes and fleet numbers without ever being asked to. That last detail changed the game more than any spreadsheet did.
What it will not do
There is no energy system, so you are never locked out of playing. There are no loot boxes. Nothing purchasable makes you win — anything sold is style or convenience, and every route and every city is reachable without spending. There are no interstitial ads interrupting a journey.
Ekene is still in development and is played publicly while it is built. Things break. When they do, they are fixed in the open.