Field Note 01
A furniture shop is already a strategy game.
A design note from building HTX Made, our business sim about an all-wood furniture shop in Houston—and the clearest demonstration we have that a specific workplace comes with its game systems pre-installed.
When we started on HTX Made, the design question wasn’t “what game should we invent about a furniture shop?” It was “which of this shop’s existing systems do we keep?” Because a working shop already runs on mechanics a strategy game would kill for:
Jobs competing for benches. The shop has two benches—three, once Marisol runs her own. Builds take four to six weeks of crew labor. Say yes to everything and the whole shop backs up behind you. That’s a queueing system with a personality.
Deposits financing lumber. Sign a job and a 35% deposit lands; then 45% goes straight back out as lumber, which takes a week or two to arrive. The cash cycle of a real trade turned out to be a tighter economic loop than anything we could have invented, so we didn’t invent one.
Finite skilled labor with opinions. Reuben is allergic to shortcuts. Marisol is ambitious enough to leave if you ignore her. Dewayne has been underpaid since before you owned the place, and he knows it. Three people, three pressures, zero abstractions.
The cost of saying yes. A $14,200 walnut dining table, $9,000 of taquería banquettes against a firm opening date, and a $19,000 lodge order—twelve pieces to one drawing—all wanting the same Tuesday. Work one lead and the others keep waiting.
The week itself became the resource. Twelve blocks of time, and nothing in the shop moves unless you spend a block on it—including you.
That last part was the real design decision. The shop’s systems arrived free; the game’s argument is the second column—the blues room on Kirby, brisket at your mother’s, whether you turn the yad stand for your nephew’s bar mitzvah yourself. Energy is what buys you time blocks, so skipping your own life doesn’t win you the shop.
The transferable lesson: when a subject is specific enough, the design work shifts from invention to selection. We didn’t add game mechanics to a furniture shop. We chose which of its real mechanics fit in fifteen minutes, and wrote down what we left out.