About

Kitchen Table · A Screwcap Games, LLC property · Updated 25 August 2026

Kitchen Table is a game about a household getting through a year on an income that does not arrive evenly. You sit at the table, the money comes in when it comes in, and you decide what gets paid — knowing that some of those choices only look wrong later.

The scenarios are real years. Volcker's 1979, a Mesa household in 2021, a year of shifting hours, a year where the work was lumpy. Each one is built on actual price and rate data, and each one is written so the hard choice is genuinely hard: there is no move that makes the year comfortable, only moves that make it survivable in different ways.

The measured thing is not net worth. It is whether you kept a cushion — runway — and how much of your outcome was judgment versus the luck of which month the boiler failed. The four-act debrief separates those two on purpose, because a game that lets you take credit for a good year you did not cause is teaching the wrong lesson.

How it pays for itself

Advertising on the free tier — on menus, between hands and on end screens, never during a live hand — with a one-time ad-free unlock to come. That is the whole business model for this game. Which analytics and advertising vendors we let near you is listed by name in the Privacy Policy; if a tool sets a cookie, it is in there.

Who makes it

Kitchen Table is made by Screwcap Games, LLC, a small independent studio in Walworth County, Wisconsin. We build games about judgment under uncertainty — monetary policy, commodity markets, household finance — and a few card and domino games that are just games. The rest of the catalogue is at Screwcap.Games.

Bugs, corrections, licensing, or an argument about the rules: play@screwcapholdings.com. Corrections to the data or the history get answered first — if something here is factually wrong, we want to know before a player does.