Market Panic

In Market Panic, every run is a ten-year market cycle and every quarter is a new test of nerve. Run an investment firm across stocks, bonds, cash, hedges, credit, private equity and crypto. Queue your moves, read the closing plan, and ring the bell - or don't, and explain to the committee why not.

Read what is inside the book

A sleeve is not one number. Open it and there are six companies inside, each with its own weight, ticker, candlestick chart and return - fourteen sleeves, eighty-four companies . One holding is usually carrying the fund and one is usually wrecking it, and you can tell which. Every chart opens on three years of tape from before your mandate began, so you are never reading a market that started the day you did.

The market is never completely safe

Bank runs, inflation shocks, speculative bubbles, liquidity freezes, scandals and twenty-seven named crises  can expose a book that looked sensible a quarter ago. Movement arrives in clusters: quiet stretches, then a handful of quarters that do most of the damage. Nothing warns you twice, and nothing on the screen is there to tell you what happens next.

Clients who can leave

Fourteen institutions, nine dealt into each run, five of them on your books from the first morning - a pension fund with retirees to pay, a family office that wants spectacular returns and hates playing safe, a reinsurer that pays out when the storms land, a union that will not subsidise anyone's speculation. Each has a promise the market can break, a board review on its calendar, and somewhere else to take its money.

The rivals across the road

Four rival houses share Kingsgate Tower, across the road from your building, drawn each run from eight. They have real portfolios, their own ideas about the next trade, and their own ideas about which of your accounts they would rather hold. Walk over. Ride up to a rival's floor and read the room: the whiteboard, the principal, who is at their desk and who is not. Then poach a trader, plant a story, make a bet with them, call a truce - or buy one of them outright.

Down the road, the City Exchange

The trading floor under the gallery, the board over it, the brokers' bar and the bell. Take a seat, ring it, list your own firm - and watch the crowd on the floor react to the market you have been trading all along.

And you can stand up

Step back from the terminal and it turns out to be a monitor on a desk, on a floor of a building, in a city. The office is drawn from the state of your run: a lamp on a desk for each client, colleagues who sit differently depending on how it is going, the committee member who has lost the most faith waiting on the floor when you get up. Take the lift down, walk out onto the street, buy the paper - the city's papers report your run as it happens.

Ten years, on film

When the run ends, however it ends, the game cuts the film of your ten years: the quarters that mattered, the calls that made it and the ones that broke it. Watch it, replay it, save it.

Finance as drama, not homework

You do not need to know finance. On your first run a colleague at the next desk explains each control the first time you rest on it, in a sentence. Research rumors, negotiate mandates, document risk exceptions, test crisis scenarios, protect liquidity, or take the aggressive line. The aim is not merely to finish with the best return. It is to build the institution that survives long enough to tell its investors why it did what it did.

Features

Turn-based roguelite runs across a full ten-year market cycle: forty quarters, each closed by a bell you choose to ring

Six firms, five of them earned by how you play, each with its own book, temperament and way of losing

Build across stocks, bonds, cash, hedges, credit, private equity and crypto - fourteen sleeves, eighty-four companies, each with three years of tape from before your mandate began

Twenty-seven named crises, from bank runs to liquidity freezes, and hundreds of smaller shocks that arrive in clusters

Fourteen institutional clients, nine dealt into each run, five of them on your books from the first morning - every one with a promise the market can break

Four rival houses each run, drawn from eight, with real portfolios, grudges, truces and designs on your accounts

Walk the city: your office floor, the lift, the street, the rivals' tower across the road and the City Exchange down it

Read a rival's floor - its whiteboard, its principal, its staff - then poach, plant a story, place a bet, or buy the house outright

Take a seat on the City Exchange, ring its bell, and list your own firm

An investment committee that drafts standing policy, reads every close and remembers what you did not answer

The city's papers report your run, and at the end of it the game cuts the film of your ten years

On your first run, a colleague at the next desk explains each control the first time you rest on it - no finance knowledge required

Forty achievements, most of them hard and some of them rude

Adaptive music, authored market audio and a building that sounds like one

Nine languages: the market writing, the briefs and the endings, not only the menus

Nine languages

Playable in English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Turkish, Japanese, Russian and Simplified Chinese - the market writing, the briefs and the endings included, not only the menus.