№ 11 A game I built 193 cards Free, in the browser

I built a game about what never makes the slides.

Samuel Young · engine, cards and balance · 193 cards written by hand

Every AI programme comes down to three things, and none of them ever reaches a slide: who is allowed to decide, what it quietly costs, and what everybody else does once they work out which way the wind is blowing. So I made a game out of those three instead.

You will probably lose. Somebody good at this survives about half the time. A bot playing at random survives five per cent.

Play now → or read one run first, week by week ↓

How it works

You: Run the programme at a company you do not own. You are not the chief executive, and everybody knows whose programme it really is. More responsibility than authority, throughout.
Each week: One thing lands on your desk, from a person or a system. Two ways to answer it and no third. You see what each one moves before you commit.
The quarter: It opens with six proposals and the money for two. Twelve weeks later it closes: a report on where the numbers actually went, six angles of which you choose two to become the board’s slides, one decision taken in the room, and then a vote on what you get next quarter.
Losing: Four numbers. Only zero kills you, and three of them fall on their own every single week. Autonomy is the one you were hired to raise, and the one that never falls by itself.
Winning: There is no score. You survive the thirty‑six weeks or you do not, and then you are told what it cost.

Trust reached zero · week twenty-nine · seven weeks short

They were replaced by somebody who had not spent the trust.

No score and no high score. A run takes about fifteen minutes, and somebody good at this survives roughly half the time, which is measured rather than hoped for: a bot playing at random survives five per cent.

Take a run yourself → The engine, the cards and the balancing are mine.

Cards

193

One a week, plus six proposals at the top of every quarter.

Ways to lose

Four

One per number, and only at the bottom of it.

What moves it most

The delay

Bills agreed in one week and paid in another. Measured as the strongest thing in the game.

The engine

Reusable

It knows nothing about this game. A second game is a config and a content pack.

← Back to the eleven panels · Built by Samuel Young · dark corporate satire · three quarters · nothing is stored · no cookies