Hi all.
Years ago I played a browser game called Bordello Battles — one of those text games you kept open in a tab at work and checked a few times a day. It’s long gone. I wanted something in that spirit but built the way I’d build it now: no account, no tutorial, no wall of numbers in the first ten minutes. You should be able to open it and be playing inside about thirty seconds.
Fair warning up front, since it matters to some people: it’s a Prohibition-era house of ill repute. The subject is handled as a business with people in it rather than as titillation — you hire, train, pay bonuses, call a doctor and buy up real estate — but the framing is what it is, and I’d rather say so here than have someone find out by clicking.
What it is: It’s 1926 and you’ve taken over three rooms above a Bowery saloon in a district run by seven other houses. Hours accrue in real time whether you’re at your desk or asleep. Spend them opening the doors: the house earns, heat builds with the precinct, and the mood inside wears down. Turn the takings into rooms, into people, into better addresses — and eventually into rackets that pay whether or not anybody’s upstairs.
The loop is: come back to a full bar of hours, deal with whatever happened while you were gone (somebody’s ill, a rival hit you, a caller turned up wanting work), decide what to buy, then spend the hours and walk away. Five minutes, a few times a day. A full bar refills in about two and three-quarter hours, so a workday or a night’s sleep tops you out and nothing is lost by not being there.
A few design choices I care about:
Nothing is hidden. Every tab is readable from the first minute. Locked things are shown greyed with the exact condition that opens them, rather than not existing until they do. If a button can’t work, it says why on the button.
Time is the only thing money can’t buy. The good addresses want a house that’s been open long enough to be known — Gramercy won’t deal with you in your second afternoon at any price. That’s what makes a season take a season instead of an afternoon.
The bell decides. There’s no threshold to cross. Whatever you’re worth when the week runs out is your score, and finishing top of the row is the title. So every hour counts to the last one, and there’s no point where you’ve won and the rest of the week is spare.
Newcomers aren’t farmed. Raid protection tapers with size rather than switching off at a line — a small house is nearly untouchable, a contender has none at all — and it applies in both directions, so it’ll carry unchanged if this ever becomes multiplayer.
Banked money cannot be taken. Not by police, not by rivals. Cash on the premises is the only thing anyone can steal.
Where it’s at: Honestly? Early, and playable. Six cities to start in, each with its own streets and rival houses, and you can expand into a second one later. The balance was substantially reworked this week and has had far more testing from scripts than from people, which is exactly the gap I’m hoping this post closes.
One thing to be straight about for this audience: it’s single-player against AI rivals, and the save lives in your browser rather than on a server. It persists — the world moves while you’re gone — but there are no other humans in your district. If a shared world is what you’re here for, this isn’t that yet.
No signup. Nothing to install. It works offline once loaded and can be added to a phone home screen.
Play it, break it, tell me it’s wrong. There’s a Feedback tab in the game that comes straight to me — no account needed, and I read all of it. Two things I’d particularly like to know: whether the first ten minutes make sense without a tutorial, and whether it’s still interesting on day three or whether it runs out of decisions.
There’s nothing to buy and no plans for that. It’s static files on a box I already pay for, so it costs me nothing to leave running.