How to play

A run is sixteen quarters. Each quarter you have three action points, then you close the quarter and the settlement prints. Every number below is exact.

The seven actions

1. Circular deal — the heart of it

One to five tokens run VectorForge → Detropic Research → Nimbus Basin and come back to your treasury. You have spent nothing. What changed is that announced deal value rose, the valuation rose with it, and a real infrastructure load now exists for four quarters. A circular deal converts future obligations into today's valuation.

Momentum: consecutive circular deals inside one quarter escalate — the second is worth 1.5×, the third 2×. Any other action breaks the chain.

2. Take credit

Borrow up to 25% of the valuation, less what you already owe. Repay 1.3× in four quarters. Interest accrues every quarter on credit tokens still sitting in your treasury, so spending borrowed money stops the meter — it does not cancel the loan.

3. Announcement

One token. Three cards are drawn from a deck of sixteen; you play one. Every card raises attention and every card has a catch.

4. Secondary offering

Mints new tokens worth 5% of the valuation. Your own stake is worth 10% less, permanently and multiplicatively.

5. Embed in Boring Industries

Costs 2 tokens, then 3, then 4. Activates a quarter later and pays one external token every quarter until the end. Slow, dull, generates no headline — and it is the only real money in the game.

6. Cash out

You hold 100 units. Sell 1 to 20 at a time; a unit is worth the valuation divided by 1000, times your accumulated dilution. Each unit sold costs 2 attention and 1% of the valuation. You cannot sell everything at once, which is the whole tension.

7. Repay early

Clears one obligation at face value, now. The boring button of an honest person.

Settlement day, in order

1. Revenue from active Boring Industries contracts.
2. Matured obligations. Colour does not matter; the count does.
3. Interest on every credit token in the system.
4. Energy and coolant for active circular deals — doubled above the Gridfather Energy megawatt cap. Losing to a coolant bill is a perfectly ordinary way to die here.
5. Attention decays by 8.
6. The quarter's event, if the seed scheduled one.
7. 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.
8. 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.

What the echo ratio measures · Play