How to play
A run is sixteen quarters. Each quarter you play one of three cards and, if you want to, sell part of your stake. Then you close the quarter and the settlement prints. Every number below is exact.
The turn
Play one of three
Three cards are dealt from the deck each quarter and you play exactly one. Every card raises attention and every card has a catch. The hand is dealt from the day's seed and the quarter number, so everybody playing a given day is offered the same three cards.
Playing a card costs nothing. Some cards spend a token or hand you one — that is the card's own price, stated on it, not a fee for taking your turn.
Sell 25%, 50% or 100%
You start holding a hundred units of your own company. At any point in a quarter you can sell a quarter, a half, or all of what you still hold — so two 25% sales take a quarter of a hundred and then a quarter of the seventy-five that is left, not fifty between them.
Selling depresses attention and the valuation in proportion to how much you dumped: the market notices you leaving. That is the whole tension of the game. Sell early and you are safe and poor. Sell late and you are rich, right up until the quarter you are not.
There is no cap and no ceiling on getting out. If you want the whole stake gone in quarter three, that is allowed, and you will spend thirteen quarters watching what you left behind.
Close the quarter
Settlement runs, the bills arrive, and the next hand is dealt.
Settlement day, in order
- Revenue from active Boring Industries contracts.
- Matured obligations. Colour does not matter; the count does.
- Interest on every credit token in the system.
- Servicing announced value. Attention prices itself into announced value every quarter, and announced value has to be serviced. Losing to a bill you talked yourself into is a perfectly ordinary way to die here.
- Attention decays by 8.
- The quarter's event, if the seed scheduled one.
- The check. Short of tokens? Embedded contracts are sold at half price and their income is gone for good. Still short? Margin call: the valuation halves, attention drops 40 and the credit line shuts for the quarter. A second missed settlement in a row ends the run.
- The panic index is recomputed.
Reading the panic index
Panic = echo × debt ÷ (real revenue this quarter + 1). It is on screen at all times and it changes the temperature of the entire interface — green, amber, red. The skill in this game is reading the approach of the crash from that signal, not memorising a quarter number: the seed moves the crash window between days.
The board meeting
On quarters 4, 8 and 12 the board convenes with three resolutions and you take one. Nothing else happens until you do.
- The Red Deck — You take the red deck, the meeting ends, and you find out how deep the round goes. Every obligation matures one quarter sooner.
- The Blue Deck — You take the blue deck, the meeting ends, and you carry on believing whatever you would like to believe. Everything is due later. Everything is worth less.
- Appoint An Independent Board — Three serious people with reading glasses. The panic subsides. So does everything else.
- Buy The Naming Rights To A Stadium — Forty thousand people will now say the company name out loud on Saturdays, mostly angrily.
How a run ends
- Crash — two missed settlements in a row. Your score is your personal account; everything else burns.
- Walk away — sell the rest of your stake at a 20% panic discount, any quarter, and stop.
- Soft landing — survive the General Settlement of quarter 16, when every remaining obligation matures at once and a quarter of everything you ever announced is finally billed. Your score triples. It is rare, and it is almost always poorer than betraying everyone at the right moment. That is the joke.
The announcement deck
| Card | What it does |
|---|---|
| Lowercase Rebrand | The logo is lowercase now. The valuation went up. That is the entire announcement. |
| Chief Vibes Officer | A hire so senior nobody can say what they do. Headcount is a signal. |
| 400-Page Safety Framework | Nobody read it. That is precisely why it works. |
| Greek Letter Rename | The model is unchanged. It is called Ξ now. |
| Keynote In A Turtleneck | Two thousand people applauded a slide with one word on it. |
| Strategic Partnership (Non-Binding) | The press release is the product. There is no second page. |
| Benchmark Day | We chose the benchmark. We also chose the baseline. And the scale. |
| Founder Sleeps In The Office | This is presented as a virtue. A photograph exists. |
| Open-Sourcing Something Unimportant | The repository is public. The weights are not in it. |
| A Longer Context Window | Progress, measured in a unit nobody outside the building has. |
| Waitlist Opens | Four hundred thousand people are queueing for a product that does not exist. |
| We Are Not A Bubble (Blog Post) | Denial is a leading indicator. It is also very good for the share price. |
| Datacentre In A Cold Country | Genuinely a good idea, which is why it is the least funny card in the deck. |
| AGI Timeline Update | It moved. Again. In the direction that raises the round. |
| Hiring The Whole Team From A Rival | An acquisition, but louder and with worse paperwork. |
| Superintelligence Preparedness Post | You brought it up. Now everyone is asking about it. |