The money turns up on a Friday.
Nobody ever taught you what to do with it.
The Oregon Trail of household money. Well — at least in this one you survive.
You are out of school. There is a job — not a career, a job — and for the first time there is money in the account on a Friday that is genuinely yours to decide about.
Nobody has taught you what to do with it. Not properly. Most people's parents were never taught either, and the ones who did work it out found it oddly hard to say out loud. So it gets learned the expensive way, on your own money, once.
Not here. Here it is free.
A practice run at the money part of your life. A real household, real prices, real wages, real decisions that stick — and not one cent of it your own. Get it wrong as often as you like. That is what it is for.
Because the two piles are pulling apart. There are people who end up owning things — a roof, savings that grow, something behind them — and people who pay for the same things twice and finish with none of it. Very little of that gap is talent, and almost none of it is luck. Most of it is a handful of ordinary decisions, made young, with nobody in the room who had ever made them before.
This is the room.
Every decision hands you another one — and the last one hands you a question to take to a real person. “I played a game set in 1979 — interest rates went to eighteen percent and petrol doubled. What did you and your family actually do?”
Somebody in your family lived that. They have almost certainly never been asked about it, and they will almost certainly remember exactly. That conversation is worth more than anything in here, and this is the cheapest way we know to start it.
Four families, the same eight decisions. Two of them are living through an economy that is falling apart; two of them are living through a very quiet one and still cannot cover the month. Start with whichever one you have an opinion about.
Eight to ten minutes each. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up to, no account. Play any two and the game lays the same decision side by side and shows you what it did in each — which is the part that stays with you.
How it worksIs any of this real? — yes, and here is exactly which parts
The economy is not scripted. Both Fed rate paths are the real ones — Volcker's between October 1979 and September 1981, Powell's between October 2021 and September 2023 — and everything that follows from them is produced by the same economic model that runs THE CHAIR: an expectations-augmented Phillips curve, Okun's law, policy transmission lags and a credibility channel.
The two scenarios differ in the physics, not the code. The decisive setting is how firmly inflation expectations are anchored — badly in 1979, firmly in 2021. That single parameter is most of the reason one episode took double-digit unemployment to end and the other cost close to nothing, and you can feel the difference from the kitchen table without ever being shown a number.
Prices set by law, or by inertia, are set that way here too. The 5.25% ceiling on a 1979 savings account is Regulation Q, not a modelling choice. Its 2021 counterpart — a big bank paying 0.06% while Treasury bills paid five percent — was not a law at all, and from the kitchen table the two are almost indistinguishable.
Prototype. Four scenarios, four households, and every mark on the screen drawn in the browser.
Some decisions are not about the economy at all. They are about a contract, and they are lost or won on one number nobody reads. These stand on their own — no game, nothing to sign up to, nothing of yours typed in.
More coming: the loan term nobody looks at · rent or buy the house · what the first ten years of a mortgage actually pay for.