A colleague nobody could hire, a horse full of colleagues, and a rank called Evil Corp

An epic colleague you could never hire.

It started with a question: the collection shows an epic colleague whose unlock condition reads "Turns up on its own as you play". Plenty of runs later, he had never turned up. That was not bad luck. HANA, the in-memory database who gives you two extra cards in your hand, was not in the starting set and had no unlock condition at all. The line about turning up on its own was simply what the collection shows when it cannot find a condition. He could not be found anywhere. He now unlocks when you reprioritise five debt cards in one go, which fits someone who keeps everything in memory. While looking, two more oddities surfaced: The Restructurer had exactly the same condition as The SLA, and Navy & Gold unlocked at the same moment as endless mode. The Restructurer now wants a card in review while a colleague has dropped out, which is his own effect in miniature. The original Navy & Gold theme now asks you to complete a Platinum run with Pico Bello Ltd, the oldest firm in the game. Back to where it all began.

A spreadsheet full of opinions.

Then a spreadsheet arrived: every colleague and certification with its effect and price, a tab per rarity, and notes in the margin such as "gamebreaking, this has to become Rare". Every change was checked against the game first and listed before anything was built. The Founder and The Inheritor, the two most-bought commons, are now rare and cost more. The Bridge Builder and The Change Specialist moved up with them; The Escalation Manager moved down from epic. Excel King and The Governance Officer became common and cheap. The Crisis Manager became epic, and his three multipliers went from ×1.3 to ×1.5. Fixed Price, Non-Disclosure and The Temp got weaker multipliers and higher prices. Ronniedinho drops to ×3, Frits climbs to ×1.75 per repeat, the technical debt register guarantees 8 hours instead of 6, and the reference architecture pays +$750 instead of +$400.

Three legends get new tricks.

LABL used to make only the discipline combinations one card shorter. He now does it for every combination: three of a kind is a Task force, a pair is already Triple booked, four in a row is a Phased approach, and a single card counts as Double booked. Princess keeps letting Politics count for every discipline, and on top of that a Junior now counts as any number in a run. And Mighty M's card always said he never goes home. It turned out he could, like anyone else. Now he really doesn't.

Five newcomers.

The Ticket Master is a common who adds six hours for every numbered card you play. Trojan Horse is a new legend at the Headhunter: every other colleague who takes part counts one and a half times as hard, and none of them drops out. The catch is in the word every: the downsides grow as well. Sales Department pushes scope up faster, the contractor costs more, and if the horse himself drops out, the protection goes with him. Three certifications join the shop: Knowledge base (+$100 rate per extra card in your deck), Framework agreement (certifications 30% cheaper) and Lean Six Sigma (play one or two cards for double rate). Each of them has its own unlock.

Measured before it went out.

A change this size does not go out on gut feeling. The smart bot, which plays the way someone who knows the game would, played ninety-six runs across every firm and partner level. Bronze stayed where it was. Silver did not: it went from winning about half its runs to about one in eight, mostly because The Inheritor, the workhorse of many runs, now shows up far less often. So Silver got some air back: certifications there cost one and a half times the Bronze price instead of double. Gold goes back to double, and since 1.8.1 its description says so. The same measurement flagged two things to watch: The Inheritor is still the strongest colleague in the game, even as a rare, and Lean Six Sigma went straight to second place among the certifications, because it stacks so nicely with The Helpdesk and The Lone Wolf.

Platinum without the debt, and a rank above the board.

Platinum no longer hands you a debt card for every engagement you win. The Change Requests in endless mode keep their own escalation, so the wall is still there, just further away. The ranks at the end of a run were stretched too: Board of Directors now starts at $500 million, and everything below it moved up in proportion. Above it sits a new rank, from one billion: Evil Corp. At those amounts you have become the thing you were fighting. Next year's quote, you write to yourself.

And the small things.

The knowledge transfer between rounds now says how many colleagues may come along, counts them, shows proper checkboxes, and swaps your choice when you pick someone else instead of silently doing nothing. The certificate and the quarterly figures that celebrate a Maturity Level 5 used to be printed on the same ivory paper in every theme, which looked odd in dark mode. They now use the paper of your theme. And in 1.8.1 LABL is welcome at Maison Maatwerk again. He used to be kept away because both did the same thing. Now Maison shortens only the disciplines and LABL shortens everything else as well, so he is worth hiring there too. They still do not stack: a Steering committee stays two cards, never one.

Version 1.8.2: twenty-five achievements for Steam.

Steam is still a few months away, but its achievements now exist. Every unlock in the game could already become one; on top of those comes a separate list of twenty-five. Some are about stamina: let fifty colleagues go (Rightsizing), accept a hundred client requests (Yes, And…) or refuse a hundred (Out of Scope), burn out fifty colleagues (What Workload?), or score with fifty debt cards (Leveraged). Some are about a single moment: bill more than ten million with one hand (That One Invoice), win a run after scope passed 500% (It's Only Scope), or hand over every certification you hold plus two colleagues in one knowledge transfer (Warm Handover). Finish a run above a billion and the rank from earlier in this post comes with an achievement of its own: You Are Evil Corp. The rest is collecting: every firm, every colleague per rarity, every certification, theme and piece of music, a completed run at each partner level, a run won with three different firms (Job Hopper) and with all of them (Every Logo on the CV). And once everything else is in, the last one follows: Signed Off.

Much of this counts retroactively. The game already kept track of colleagues let go, requests accepted and refused, the daily engagement and every run completed per firm and level, so a player who has been at it for a while starts Steam with part of the list already done. What it did not count yet, such as burnouts and the debt cards that actually scored, it counts from today. In the browser none of this is visible; the achievements only exist in the desktop version, and only once it runs through Steam. Also slipped in today: the description of Legacy Partners now says what the firm actually does. Six debt cards, a stamp that makes a card type permanently stronger after every engagement won, and drinks that lean towards colleagues who live on debt.