A Brand New Colors Game
Run a mob crew while the boss does time
You're the acting boss of a crew in Essex County, New Jersey, holding the old man's chair for twenty weeks while he fights a federal case upstate. Every week brings one problem to settle, and your answer moves the cash, the respect, the heat, the crew's loyalty and your own nerves.
What this is
A strategy game you play one week at a time
You run the crew for twenty weeks while the old man fights his federal case. Each week deals one problem — a skimming clerk, a container off the pier, a gray sedan outside your house — and you answer it. Hold the chair the whole twenty without getting indicted, deposed or buried, and it's yours for good.
Why it matters
You get the chair. Then you get the nights.
Everybody wants the seat until they're in it. The game keeps your authority and your sleep on the same screen, because one is paid for out of the other.
Everybody waits on your word
The docks, the locals, the book, the envelope going upstate — nothing moves until you say so. A capo asks for a crew of his own. A monsignor asks for a favor.
Four in the morning
Nerves is a gauge like any other and it climbs with the heat. There's a doctor on Route 17 who helps, if you can sit fifty minutes without saying anything indictable.
Nothing comes free
Respect bought with muscle costs heat. Cash squeezed out of the crew costs loyalty. Every gauge you raise is paid for out of another one.
The world
Six guys, and every one of them wants something
Your crew aren't stat blocks with names on them. Each man carries his own muscle, brains and earning number, his own loyalty, and his own exposure to a federal file — and one of them has been talking since week one.
- Dom Pellegrino, consigliere, brains 3. He drives the envelope upstate and comes back with what the old man said. Your best odds on anything needing a brain instead of a bat.
- Big Sal Bonsignore, capo, earning 3. Earns better than anyone and fights nobody. A third of your weekly number lives in his head, which becomes your problem the week his chest does.
- Richie Two-Times, capo. Wants a card game and a loan route of his own, kicking up a flat number instead of a percentage. Everyone in the room can read the move.
- Petey Knuckles, soldier, muscle 3. Send him to negotiate and you deserve what happens. Send him to the parking lot and nobody bothers the club for months.
- Satriano's pork store on Bloomfield Avenue — clean money, a register that doesn't balance, and the back room where the real conversations happen.
- Dr. Elena Russo, Route 17. A calm office and a way of asking the question under the question. One careless name puts a witness in the world.
What you choose
Four decisions, every week
The same four questions come around for twenty weeks, and the answers compound.
How to answer the problem
A container walks off the pier, a dentist stops paying, a gray sedan parks outside your house. Two or three ways through, each with a price you can see before you commit.
Who takes the job
Risky work needs a man and the odds are on the table — Dom at 76%, Big Sal at 58%. Whoever goes spends the following week resting, so the guy you trust most is the guy you can't keep using.
What to do with the rest of the week
Collect envelopes, lay low, grease the precinct, hold court at the pork store, or take a sour man to dinner before he becomes a problem.
What goes in the envelope
Tribute is due upstate on weeks 5, 10, 15 and 20, and it grows every time — $55k by week 15. Pay it, send half with an explanation, or squeeze the crew to cover it.
See it
Real decisions from a real run
Every frame below is the game itself, mid-run, with the numbers it actually produced.
Who it welcomes
Never watched a mob show? Doesn't matter.
Nothing here asks you to catch a reference. The game explains a pork store, a union local and an envelope going upstate the same way it explains everything else — by handing you a decision about one and showing what it costs.
- You can lose, and often will. Five gauges each have a floor and touching any of them ends the run. Every man you send out is a man who could come back with a problem.
- About fifteen minutes. It opens instantly and the first decision lands in the first minute. No download, no install, no tutorial.
- Three difficulties. Associate is forgiving, Capo is the real game, Boss is a grind where your nerves usually get you first.
- Comfort settings. No sound at all, so there's nothing to mute. Reduced-motion preferences are honored, and the whole game plays from the keyboard — number keys choose, Enter deals the next week.
- Adult subject matter. Violence, mostly implied rather than shown, an affair, and a man who may not survive being found out. Nothing explicit — closer to a paperback than a prestige drama.
No account. Nothing saved. Nothing to uninstall. The game asks for no permissions and writes nothing to your machine. If it isn't for you, close the tab — you're out fifteen minutes and zero dollars.
How it ends
Twenty weeks, and then a verdict
Four of the five ways out arrive early, the moment a gauge hits its floor. The fifth waits at week twenty, when the administration sits down to confirm you or not.
A grand jury
Let it climb and the file with your name on it stops being a file.
A hospital
The chair is heavier than it looks, and the panic doesn't care how well the week went.
Your own guys
A crew that stops respecting you stops protecting you, and they know your schedule.
The arithmetic at week twenty is five months of everything — the envelopes, the crew, the file, and the man who's been talking the whole time. Whether he's still around to testify depends on how you treated him.
The Back Room
Go on. They're waiting in the back.
Twenty weeks between you and the big chair. See how many you last.
Play