A Brand New Colors Game
You run an outdoor cinema company.
This is a business simulator you play in your browser: you're Jeff, owner of a mobile outdoor movie company in Austin, and your whole year rides on the forty-two nights between September twentieth and Halloween. You sell the bookings, hire the crew, buy the vans, take the mic when nobody else can, and watch the radar.
The booking calendar you fill during the game. Pink squares are nights you have sold; outlined squares are the weekend dates still open.
Why it matters
An empty pool deck at six. Two hundred neighbors at eight.
What you are actually selling is not a movie. It is the few hours an ordinary shared space stops being a place people walk through.
Before
A courtyard people walk through on the way to their doors. A parking lot. A lawn nobody has stood on since June. The kind of ordinary space every apartment complex, brewery, and school in the city already owns.
After dark
A forty-foot screen glowing over the water, kids in pajamas on blankets, neighbors meeting neighbors they've lived above for two years. The movie is the excuse. The gathering is the product.
The world
Your customers are apartments on weekends and everyone else midweek
Apartment communities book Fridays and Saturdays; breweries, congregations, schools, nonprofits, and corporate campuses fill the thirty weeknights in between. You pitch all of them, and the people on the other side of those calls become the recurring cast.
The managers
Denise crosses her arms before you finish the pitch and demands a trial night. Marisol ghosts you for a month, then apologizes with two bookings. Carl approves vendors through a portal named VendorSync360, staffed by a bot named Chip.
The city
A hill-country brewery wants a Wednesday series. A congregation wants family nights during the holiday. A senior community's activity director asks the question you've been hoping for, and a resident named Marguerite has already made a sign.
The company
Priya, your best host, gets a poaching offer with a lanyard attached. Chad opens a family movie night by plugging his crypto podcast. Dale Rumsford, who quit over licensing, is out there undercutting you with a screen that sags in the middle. Scout the dog closes deals by wearing a bandana.
What you choose
You get twelve turns before the season starts
Each turn is a two-week stretch with two moves in it, plus a posture you set for the stretch — hunt for bigger deals, build the crew, coast to recover, or spend money being seen. Sales calls branch: hold your rate against a forty-percent-lower quote, or fold and teach the whole market your prices are soft.
Selling is half the game. Capacity is the other half. Three crews cover about twenty-one shows; a second van doubles your sellable calendar; the full fleet runs three screens a night somewhere in the city. Oversell your people and the season starts breaking — double-booked nights, a transmission at 190,000 miles, a host whose phone goes to voicemail forty minutes before doors.
Mini-games sit inside the big decisions: walk a site before you quote it, sequence a four-hour load-in, and make the rain call at 5:40pm with a cell forty miles out and two hundred chairs filling.
Come as you are
The questions worth answering before you click
Nothing here requires knowing anything about outdoor movies, running a business, or games in general. Here is what you are actually signing up for.
Do I need to know anything?
Zero prior knowledge. If you've ever watched a movie outside, you're overqualified. The game explains itself as you play.
Can I fail?
Yes, gently. A lean season stings and teaches; the run always finishes. Three difficulty settings, and the hardest one gives your rival a war chest.
How long? What's it cost?
A full run takes about twenty minutes. Free, no sign-up, works on a phone. Fine to hand to a kid or a parent — the roughest thing in it is a raccoon.
It saves nothing and asks for no permissions. Close the tab and it's gone; start again and it's fresh. The starfield holds still if your system prefers reduced motion.
How it ends
The season plays out on the calendar you built
When the twelve turns run out, the booking window opens and the run ends. The calendar you built is the calendar you get: the nights that glow and the ones left dark, the relationships kept warm and the one you may have burned, and a crew that either held together or came apart under the load. Four seasons are possible. One of them fills every night in the city.
What that feels like is yours to find out.