The drinks get a desk drawer, a casino wheel, and a certificate for gamblers

The drinks needed some tension.

After every engagement you go to the drinks, and there you buy what lasts: colleagues, certifications, an extra card for your deck. All of it is permanent, which makes it a place of choices but never of nerves. You never had to dare anything there. So the drinks got two new things: one-off items you keep for the right moment, and a rare wheel you only get to spin once.

A desk drawer.

At about half of the drinks there is now a consumable on offer, in place of one of the colleagues or the extra card, so the table still holds four things. There are twenty-two of them. A Wellness day takes one colleague back to zero fatigue, and if they had dropped out, they are back. A Team outing to the go-karts takes the whole team down by forty percent. A Scope workshop with sticky notes takes ten percent off your scope; a Change Advisory Board blocks the next time it grows. A Legal review voids Evil Corp's condition, now or at its next proposal. A Leaked proposal wins you the next Tender. Pizza for the overtime gives you an extra sprint and makes everyone a bit more tired. A Reorganisation lets you let go of as many colleagues as you like, for free. An Exchange Project swaps a colleague for a completely random one at the same level. And a LinkedIn application hires someone entirely at random, at the lowest level, which once in a while turns out to be a legend.

You buy them and keep at most two, in your desk drawer. The drawer sits with the rest of your status: next to the cards on the playing field, under Team on the map and in the overview at the drinks. Each consumable has its own small drawing, a lotus for the wellness day, a checkered flag for the karting, scales for the legal review, and they all share one colour that belongs to nothing else in the game, so you never mistake one for a colleague or a certificate. It started out as turquoise; see below for what it became. Tap one and it opens like a colleague's card, with Use and Discard. The first version had letter codes and a colour per kind of item; one of those colours was the purple of an Epic colleague, which was exactly the confusion it should avoid.

Crazy Time.

At roughly one in eight drinks, about as often as the Headhunter turns up on the map, the first spot holds a carnival ticket instead of a colleague: CRAZY TIME, one spin, with a tear-off stub that is the button and shows the price. Behind it is a casino wheel with ten equal slots. Six win: an extra team slot for the rest of the run, which is the jackpot; three times your stake; a fully rested team; Evil Corp's condition voided; a random colleague; a random consumable. Four lose: thirty percent more scope, five debt cards in your deck, your budget frozen so you lose your stake a second time, and a team that is suddenly thirty percent more tired. Black wins, red loses, the jackpot is gold, and the studio's K sits in the middle.

The wheel went through four designs: a fairground wheel with light bulbs, a dark game-show wheel, a pie chart straight out of a strategy deck, and the casino. The ticket had two rivals, a gold gift voucher and a theatre marquee with bulbs. All colours come from the theme you play in, so the gold is bronze in one theme and phosphor green in another, while black and red stay readable everywhere.

It also has to feel smooth. The first wheel was redrawn by the game on every frame, and it stuttered as soon as anything else happened. Now the whole wheel is one layer that the browser turns by itself, with a long, slowing run-out, a tick and a little flick of the pointer at every slot. With the processor slowed down four times, roughly a Steam Deck on a bad day, not a single frame was late.

It's not gambling if you know you're winning.

There is a new certification to go with it: Certified Gambling Professional. With it, two of the losing slots flip over on the wheel, visibly, every time you open it. Thirty percent more scope becomes thirty percent less, and five debt cards in your deck become five debt cards gone. Six winning slots become eight.

Still the same run.

Every run in Koonsultancy can be replayed exactly from its seed. That stays true: what lies on the table at the drinks and where the wheel stops are drawn from the seed and the place on the map, separately from everything else. Whether you buy, spin or walk past, the rest of the run comes out the same. A bot that plays like a person ran the whole route with and without the new drinks, ninety-six runs on each side, with an earlier version of the wheel: the win rates moved, but within the noise. The final wheel, with its team-slot jackpot, gets the same treatment next. The prices are a first guess and will move as people play.

Buttons that mean something.

The row of controller buttons at the bottom of the screen used to be the same everywhere, including buttons that did nothing on that screen. It now shows only what works where you are, and in a window only what works in the window. The team button on the playing field, which only told you how many cards were in your hand, now opens the run stats: your revenue so far, the engagement at hand, your best sprint, and how often you played each hand. Things you cannot take right now, a colleague you cannot afford or a full team, can be reached with the arrows anyway, so you can read what they are; pressing A simply does nothing. Cards locked in review can be selected too, which matters for the one kind you are only allowed to reprioritise. Going back the way you came now really takes you back where you were, B goes back on every screen with a back button, and the keyboard learned the controller's X and Y.

Some of this went out quietly in 1.12.1 yesterday, together with a round of measurements on what made the game stutter on slower machines. The worst one: while a sprint was being counted, the controller support checked the whole screen again for every single digit that ticked up. That is gone too.

Everything on the table gets a material.

Later the same day, version 1.13.1 went over the looks of the drinks: every kind of thing for sale now looks like the object it is. Colleagues are staff passes, with a band in the colour of their rarity carrying the company logo and a staff number, a passport photo, a barcode and a round punched hole for the lanyard. The material tells you the rarity before you read it: a common is plain grey-white plastic, a rare is white plastic with a blue band, an epic is dark plastic with a gold chip and a hologram on the photo, and a legendary is brushed gold with a silver chip. The same passes now sit in your team, and when you tap one it opens in full, band and hole included.

Consumables became savings stamps with perforated edges, printed in burgundy on cream paper; the turquoise is gone. Certifications are certificates on cream paper with a hatched border in diploma blue, a gold seal with the K on two ribbons and a signature. The extra card for your deck is a casino card in white linen stock with corner indices. Every item on the table now has the same height, with the buy button in the same place. On a dark background the white plastic, the linen and the paper are dimmed, like things on a desk in a dark room, except the Crazy Time ticket, which turns carnival red with gold print so it still jumps out.

The wheel got lights. The wooden rim with twenty bulbs now stands still while only the slots spin. The bulbs chase each other, faster while the wheel turns, and when it stops they flash gold for a win or flicker red, like a failing tube, for a loss. The rubber stamp that announced the result is replaced by a small casino sign with bulbs along its edges and the outcome in neon: WINNER, JACKPOT or BAD LUCK. Tried and dropped along the way: a lanyard, a CV with a polaroid, a business card, a pass in a plastic sleeve, a fanned hand of cards, a booster pack and a card covered in pips.