The office moves in: casino cards, manila folders, and a staff yearbook

A theme we had already started.

Yesterday the drinks got materials: colleagues for sale became staff passes, consumables became savings stamps, certifications became certificates, and the extra card for your deck became a casino card in white linen. It worked so well that the rest of the game started to look flat next to it. So this release follows the same rule everywhere else: every kind of thing in the game becomes a real object from an office, in the same shape and size and in the same place, only the material changes. Card stock, paper and plastic look the same in every colour theme, and on a dark background they are dimmed, like things on a desk in a dark room. Every choice below came out of a page of side-by-side variants.

Your hand is a deck of casino cards.

The cards you play with every sprint now match the extra card at the drinks: white linen stock with a soft sheen, a double frame and corner indices in the colour of the discipline, the bottom one upside down like a real playing card. The drawing of the discipline sits faintly in the exact middle of the card. The proportions are unchanged, so nothing moves on the table. The six little dots you used to drag a card by are gone, from the cards and from the colleagues in your team: hold anything for a third of a second, anywhere on it, and it lifts; a short tap still selects, and the tap after a drag no longer selects anything by accident.

Debt cards needed to feel different at a glance. They are now dunning notices: a yellow carbon copy torn off a pad, typed in carbon blue, with a red margin line, a reference number and the company stamp faintly in the corner. A version with a red SECOND REMINDER stamp was tried and taken off again; the yellow alone already says enough.

Engagements come in folders.

The choices on the map are manila folders now: an empty tab, a sheet sticking out, a paper clip, and the kind of engagement as a red rubber stamp, with larger icons than before. Evil Corp's proposal is the same folder, wide and black, with a red ribbon across the corner that says CONFIDENTIAL. It had a wax seal for a while, first on the tab and then over the button. It never looked right in either place, so it went.

The archive is a drawer.

Every finished run becomes a hanging file in a dark drawer, with a cream label carrying your revenue, the firm, the partner level and the date, and a green or red dot for delivered or failed. The first version had plastic tabs on every folder and a metal frame with rails; both were too busy, and the drawer is now simply dark and smooth, with only a short hook on each side of each file.

A yearbook of colleagues.

The list of everyone you can unlock had the colleagues as plain lines of text. They are now a page from a ring binder: a passport photo per colleague, the same one as on their staff pass, stuck on with photo corners and each a little crooked, the name typed underneath, what they do, and a stripe in the colour of their rarity. Anyone you have not met yet is a VACANCY, with what it takes to fill it.

The initials on those photos were sometimes odd, because they came from a short nickname: The Crisis Manager showed a single C. They now come from the full name, without "the", so The Crisis Manager is CM, The SLA stays SLA, and Dutch compounds like Crisismanager are split too. When two colleagues share initials, both get a small extra letter right after the first one: CʳM for the Crisis Manager, CʰM for the Change Manager.

Business cards and partner cards.

Choosing a firm now means picking a business card. All eight are the same size, and each firm has its own house style: Pico Bello in a classic serif and navy, Kroese & Kroese in typewriter type, Legacy Partners in burgundy, Bodyshop in loud orange capitals. The description of the firm you picked sits below the cards, so long texts no longer make one card bigger than the rest.

The partner levels above them are metal cards: brushed bronze, silver and gold with a chip and the K stamped in, and platinum as a cool white with a hint of mother-of-pearl, so it no longer looks like a second silver. On a wide screen each level fills its whole box in the proportions of a real bank card, which still fits on a Steam Deck without scrolling. Whatever you have completed with a firm lies on its business card as a neat little stack of those cards. A version with heraldic shields was built first and swapped out.

The handover document, and the inbox.

The handover document you get at the end of a run now has a staple in the corner, an initial in blue ballpoint across the bottom line and a coffee ring. The ring lands somewhere different every time and may hang half over the edge of the page.

The little messages from the client that pop up while you play ("Why is stock at −40? We only sold 40.") now arrive the way they would on a real workday: alternately as an e-mail notification with an envelope and the sender's initials, and as a chat message with a green status dot and the text in a speech bubble. Both are equally welcome.

And the drinks fit.

On a Steam Deck the drinks scrolled by a few pixels whenever a colleague with a long description was on offer, which pushed the buttons just out of view. The three rows of offers are always the same height, so one long text made all of them taller. When that happens now, the offer shrinks by a few percent until everything fits, and only then. Not chosen this round, and left for another day: framed certificates on a wall, the timeline as a whiteboard with magnets, the target as a competitor's quote, and the desk drawer as a wooden drawer.

1.14.1: a greener wheel, and a black box.

A few hours later, a small follow-up. The Crazy Time wheel at the drinks showed its winning slots in black, and black reads as bad news. Winning slots are now casino green, losing ones stay red, and the jackpot stays gold. While we were at it the wheel got a proper finish: every slot shades from dark at the hub to light at the rim, there is a gold rim around the slots, a sheet of glass that stays put while the wheel turns underneath, lacquered wood with a brass ring, a small ruby in the pointer and a shadow on the table. It also turns up less often: on 7 in every 100 drinks instead of 12. It felt like a fixture rather than a surprise.

In dark mode the office was still a little too bright. The linen cards, the manila folders, the certificates, the stamps, the business cards, the yearbook and the white staff passes now sit about a fifth darker, with darker ink so the text stays readable, like things on a desk after the lights have been dimmed.

And then the less visible part. On an iPhone, with the game added to the home screen, it now and then simply vanished mid-run: a white flash, and the app was gone. That is the phone closing the page, not the game throwing an error, so the game itself never sees it happen. It now keeps a small black box: a note that it is open, and the last few steps before that moment (which screen, which window, a sprint, a spin of the wheel). If the note is still open the next time you start, the game knows it was cut off and shows you exactly what it wrote down. You can copy that, or tap "Send to the developer", and then that text, and only that text, comes to this site. Nothing is ever sent by itself, there is no name or e-mail in it, and the reports disappear after half a year; section 07 of the privacy policy has the details. One possible cause has already been fixed: after a hiccup, the music tried to catch up on every note it had missed, all at once. It now skips them and stays in time.