A Brand New Colors Game
The room hasn’t decided about you yet.
You have five bits, a heckler somewhere in the dark, and about fifteen minutes to change its mind. Then you load the van and do it again in the next city.
What this is
A van, a tour, and five bits a night.
You’re a stand-up on a six-city tour with a van, five bits a night, and a room that starts out unconvinced. Boise on a Tuesday. Nashville during a bachelorette party. A laundromat off the interstate, if a club drops you over your reputation. Every set is five choices and whatever the room does back.
Why it matters
The ice machine, then the room.
When a bit dies you hear the ice machine. You hear the air conditioning, a chair scraping somewhere, a waitress wincing on your behalf. When a bit lands, somebody snorts a drink and a stranger high-fives another stranger.
The whole game lives in the distance between those two sounds, and that distance is five decisions wide.
Who and what is inside it
Twelve rooms, six hecklers, and a dog that is tough but fair.
No two tours are the same shape. The cities shuffle, the conditions roll fresh every night, and the people you meet on the road have a habit of turning back up in the front row.
The rooms
Six venues drawn from twelve: the Chuckle Bunker in Albany, which is a basement, literally a basement. The Neon Coffin. Drip & Grin. The Polite Riot, where they laugh quietly and email you praise afterward. The Gutter Palace last.
The hecklers
Six of them, and each one folds to a different move. The Drunk wants a drink bought for him. The Comedy Snob respects nothing but a clean roast. Somebody’s Mom would like you to watch your language.
The nights
Eleven conditions, rolled before you go on. Corporate Buyout: stiff, sober, badges on. Rainy Tuesday: twelve damp people who almost stayed home. Power Outage: candles on every table, intimate, flammable.
What you choose
Every laugh has a price and you set it.
There is no correct set. There is the set this room will take tonight, and the question of how much of your reputation you’re willing to spend finding out.
Which bit, and how hot
Three bits offered, rated safe-ish to spicy. Spicy plays enormously to a rowdy room and buries you at a corporate buyout — and it raises your heat, which is the number that decides whether the next club keeps your booking.
What to do about row two
Roast them, fold them into the bit, buy them a drink, or ignore them entirely. Read the type wrong and the room takes their side. Read it right and their own table applauds you.
Land a bit hard enough and it banks as a callback, worth more the second time you use it — because they remember. Kill on your fifth and they’ll want a sixth, which is a gamble with the whole night’s average riding on it.
Who it welcomes
Come in, sit anywhere.
You do not need to know anything about stand-up. The game teaches you the way a room teaches you, which is quickly and in public.
- Do I need to know comedy?No. Every choice explains what it’s trading before you make it.
- Can I lose?You can bomb, and bombing is survivable. There is no game over — a dead room is a worse tour, not a stopped one.
- How long is it?About fifteen minutes for a full tour. A little longer if you keep taking the encore.
- Can I hand this to a kid, or to my mother?Yes. The bits are titles, not punchlines — the edge is a comic’s appetite for risk, not the content. Nothing explicit, no swearing, no gore.
- Does it need anything from my device?Nothing. No sound at all, so no volume surprises. It honors reduced-motion settings, saves nothing, and asks for no permissions.
- What does it cost?Nothing, now or later.
How it ends
The Gutter Palace, and the back row is industry.
Six cities in, New York is the last room, and it is the biggest room. Everything you did to get there walks in with you.
What you carry in
Your fans, your heat, what’s left of your composure, and the cash from a merch table run by a man named Deej. Also the callbacks you banked, if you still have any left to spend.
How it lands
Eight endings. Some are earned in New York and some were decided a thousand miles earlier, by how you treated a heckler in Tulsa or what you said to Flo at two in the morning.
The dog remembers. So does Brittany. That’s as far as we’ll take you.