A Brand New Colors Game
You run a salon. Now grow a chain.
This is a management game: one shop, three chairs, and twenty-four thousand dollars. Every week you set the prices, staff the chairs, pay the rent, and decide whether the profit buys a second location.
What this is
One salon, three chairs, twenty-four thousand dollars.
You sign a lease on a haircut salon somewhere in the Austin metro and open the doors. Each week you price the cuts, staff the chairs, and pay the rent, the wages, and a six percent franchise royalty. Twelve neighborhoods sit within driving distance, from San Marcos to Georgetown. You get as many as you can afford.
Why it matters
You have opinions about every strip-mall haircut you have ever paid for.
Nobody has ever handed you the keys. Empty chairs, then a waiting list.
Two stylists and a minus sign
You read the rent line twice, then open anyway.
A hundred cuts, and a hundred and fourteen you could not seat
The demand is there. The chairs are not.
Five shops across the metro
A Saturday in Westlake where the only problem left is space.
The world
Twelve neighborhoods, and none want the same haircut.
Each location carries its own rent, foot traffic, and average ticket, and you unlock it by paying the buildout up front.
- San Marcos cuts at twenty-two dollars and never stops moving. Westlake pays forty-two and closes early.
- The Domain charges three thousand a week in rent, and South Congress wants thirty-six thousand just to open the door.
- Stylists arrive with a skill level, a speed, a wage, and sometimes a specialty. They lose morale when you underpay them and when you leave them slammed.
- SXSW floods the central shops. ACL does it again in October. A February storm takes the power out, and a food truck park opening next door beats a month of advertising.
What you choose
Four decisions, then you open the doors.
Price the cuts
Value fills the chairs and thins the margin. Premium pays in Westlake and empties the room in Pflugerville.
Staff the chairs
Hire from three candidates a week, train them for a thousand or so, or match the offer when a competitor calls.
Spend it or bank it
Nothing, two-fifty, five hundred, or a thousand a week on marketing. Renovate before the inspector arrives, or gamble that he likes you.
Buy the next buildout
Twelve thousand adds two chairs to a shop you own. Twenty opens a second address in Round Rock.
See it
The week always ends with a receipt.
Every number on this page came out of a real run of the game.
Who it welcomes
Come in, we take walk-ins.
No account. Nothing saved. Nothing to uninstall. If it is not for you, close the tab — you are out twenty minutes and zero dollars.
Do I need to know anything?
No. If you can read a rent bill you can play this. The first decision arrives in the first minute, and there is no tutorial to sit through.
Can I lose?
Yes. Run fifteen thousand dollars past the bottom and the lender stops taking your calls. About twenty minutes to a first ending either way.
Is it comfortable?
No sound at all, no timers, nothing that flashes. It honors your system's reduced-motion setting, works on the phone in your hand, and asks for no permissions.
How it ends
Five shops, two hundred thousand dollars, four stars.
That is what the franchise wants back, and getting there takes a run of good weeks stacked end to end. Somewhere in the middle the arithmetic stops being frightening and starts being yours — a week where you check the receipt before you check the cash. What is on the other side of that morning is worth reaching without us describing it.