Is Gambling Bad For Business?

Congratulations on your new company. You have one tiny office, a stack of CVs and a coin on the desk.

The coin is optional. Technically.

Is Gambling Bad for Business? is a deadpan office tycoon about a CEO who can't stop betting the company. Hire people, grow the value, build your tower one floor at a time, and find out exactly how much risk a business can take before the Board calls a meeting.


Every applicant comes with a CV: degree, major, personality traits and what they'll likely earn you per day. Hire them or skip them, and take on hiring tasks that ask for exactly the right person. Staff files show who pays for their desk and who doesn't. You can fire people, but severance costs 30 days' salary and the office will talk about it.

Your office has a limit. When it's full, it's full. You need more floors.


Coin flips, blackjack and slots, all played with the company's money. Winning feels great. Losing leaves a hole in the ledger.

Every bet raises your Heat. Keep betting and the auditors show up, your staff's morale drops and the Board's trust drops with it. After a bad loss the game will ask one question: "Win it back?"


Your headquarters is a side-view tower. Add floors, fill them with offices, break rooms, meeting rooms, server rooms, a trading floor and a casino room, then furnish and upgrade each one. Your employees move in as little figures at their desks.

There's one rule: construction is paid for with gambling winnings only. Want a new floor? You'll have to win it.


Things go wrong at the office, and they go wrong on an old beige CRT. Twenty crisis mini-games (safe cracking, keypad codes, whack-a-mole, math blitz, pattern memory and more) decide whether a disaster costs you nothing or a lot. Nearly 600 risk cards also land on your desk, and each one makes you choose between playing it safe and going big.

• Board meetings every 10 days. Choose a Safe, Stretch or Moonshot target. Miss too often and the Board restructures you.
  
• Your manager. On day 5, pick one of three candidates. They bring you real decisions with real consequences, give advice based on their personality, expect to be paid well, and can quit.
  
• 91 skills to unlock with skill points.
  
• A stock market for when the casino isn't volatile enough.
  
• Promotions from Start-up to Company, Corporation, Executive, Tycoon, Mogul and Billionaire.

If your company hits $0, you face a bankruptcy hearing. You can take a loan, bet everything on one last coin flip, or close the doors. Game over is final: the save goes with the company.

Reach $10 billion and you're a High Roller.


Reach $1 billion and six online cities open: London, New York, Tokyo, Istanbul, Dubai and Shanghai. Each city is its own world, shared with real players. Buy unclaimed land from the city, draw a pixel-art logo and put your company's name on the skyline. Your land earns rent.

Land that someone else owns can't be bought. It can only be won. Put 1.5 times what the owner paid on the table and play them at blackjack: win and the plot is yours, lose and they keep the land and your money. A plot that just changed hands is protected for 24 hours, then it's fair game again. Grab the landmarks, climb the rich list and own the city.

Features

• A business tycoon where gambling is both the fastest way up and the fastest way out
  
• Hiring from CVs, staff files and a hard office capacity limit
  
• A side-view HQ tower built floor by floor, room by room, with winnings only
  
• Coin flips, blackjack and slots, plus a Heat meter that makes the auditors notice
  
• 20 crisis mini-games and nearly 600 risk cards
  
• Board meetings, a manager with opinions, 91 skills, and a stock market
  
• Permanent bankruptcy, and a $10 billion win
  
• Six online cities: buy land, draw your logo and conquer other players' plots at blackjack
  
• Cloud saves tied to your Steam account

No real money is involved. The only thing you can lose is a company that never existed.