Shhh, IT!

I came up with this game about ten years ago, back when I was working at EA. We made a paper deck in the office, drew silly faces on the cards, wrote equally silly rules and played it over lunch. I even wrote an engine for it in C++, but life got busy and the project ended up in a box. Six months ago, while clearing out my garage, I found that very deck and realized the game was still funny. I reworked the cards and bonuses and updated the bosses, since in ten years the industry has managed to change its bosses too, so now you’ll meet some complete strangers like Gil Bates and Alt Selman. I hope it reminds you how much fun a simple ten-minute tabletop game can be.

Nine startups out of ten die in their first year. Nonsense!

If you have two juniors, ten dollars and a brilliant plan, you have everything you need. Well, almost everything...

Hire developers, ship releases and take on contract work so there's money for more releases. Every release brings hype. Whoever reaches 20 hype first wins.

The catch: everyone moves at once and in secret. You never know where your rivals will send their people but crowd always costs more.

How a day goes

The morning starts with a stand-up where everyone keeps a perfect poker face while deciding where to send their developers: Hire, Release, R&D or Outsource. It all happens in secret, as it should in any respectable company where nobody knows what the team next door is doing. While you’re at it, you can slip your rivals one trap, purely out of friendship.

Then comes the reveal, and the zones open one by one. This is where you find out that half the city also decided today was a great day to hire seniors, and the market is not made of rubber: every rival who got there before you adds a dollar to the price of your seat. Early birds get the worm, everyone else pays the late fee.

Next come the actions. You hire a senior who will finally explain to the juniors why prod went down, ship the “Blockchain Toaster” the market has clearly been waiting for, dig through R&D for new cards, or quietly make some money on someone else’s project while nobody’s looking.

In the evening, it’s time to count. Hit 20 hype and leave everyone behind, and congratulations, you’re a unicorn. If not, no big deal: tomorrow it’s back to work, and nobody cancelled the stand-up.

What's inside

There are 64 releases in the backlog, from the “Wi-Fi Kettle” all the way to “AGI in Two Weeks”, and among them hide six killer features, especially evil cards that everyone gets to play just once per game, so choose your moment wisely.

For your dear rivals there are 8 traps. Our favorite is the “All-Day Call” in Outsource: their people sit in a meeting from nine to six and get paid exactly nothing for it, which, let’s be honest, is just a regular Tuesday.

The market won’t sit still either. 24 trends rewrite the rules for everyone in the middle of the game: an IPO suddenly raises the bar, and a crypto winter makes releases cheaper, because someone has to ship something while the blockchain guys are crying.

Your team has character, for better or worse. Juniors, middles and seniors come with traits like “Freelancer”, “Afraid of Prod” or “Cinder”, and then there are the AI developers, who happily work weekends but quietly eat a dollar a day in tokens.

And yes, Friday deploys are allowed. Each one leaves you a face-down incident that goes off on a random day next week. Maybe prod goes down. Maybe you get away with it. That’s the thrill of a Friday deploy.

Play your way

Get a team of two to six together online, in an open room or a private one with a code, friends only. If your colleagues are late to the call again, bots will take the empty seats, and at least they show up on time.

Take on bots of four difficulty levels. It starts with the cautious Coward, who is afraid of his own shadow and of prod, and ends with Gil Bates, the boss who sees every card and cheats so shamelessly you’d think he wrote that much-hated Windoze himself... oh wait, he kind of did, which is why he’s the boss, even if he’s only Bates.

You can also gather around one computer and pass the mouse around, like the good old days when the whole office had one PC and it lived under someone’s desk. And if you’re new here, the tutorial will walk you through your first two workdays, kind of like onboarding, only shorter and with a mentor who actually answers.

A game takes about 20 in-game days, 10–15 minutes for session. 25 rare achievements.