How It Works

Shareholder Party is a free browser board game for 2 to 6 players. You are an employee. You move around a floorplan of an office, gathering Shareholder Value so you can spend it on objectives that benefit somebody else. Everything the game does to you arrives as a printed memo, because that is how it happens in real life.

Nothing needs installing and nobody needs an account. If you would rather learn by doing, open a room, hire a temp and read this afterwards.

The object of the game

At the start of a game the company publishes a roadmap: a short list of objectives that everybody is racing to deliver. Signing off one objective with THE BOARD costs 15 SV, or 20 SV if you catch them in a room they were not expecting you in. The first employee to deliver every objective on the roadmap wins.

You begin with 10 SV, which is deliberately not enough to buy anything. The roadmap is shared, not personal, so you are all chasing the same list in the same order, and the objectives themselves are things like HEADCOUNT OPTIMISED and CULTURE EMBEDDED. Delivering one changes nothing about your life. That is the joke, and it is also the win condition.

How long the roadmap is depends on the preset the host chose:

A turn, step by step

Turn order is drawn at random when the game starts and shown as a performance ranking, which is not negotiable. The employee who goes first rotates by one every round, so nobody keeps the advantage.

1. Your turn opens. The timer starts. Everyone else can see whose turn it is.
2. You may use one item from the 3 you can carry, before you roll. One item per turn, never more. Some items ask you to nominate a colleague.
3. You roll one die. OVERTIME AUTHORISATION is the only thing that gives you two, and it costs you a point of burnout.
4. You walk that many tiles. Nothing fires as you pass over it, with one exception: entering RECEPTION pays +5 SV whether you stop there or walk straight through.
5. If you reach a door mid-walk you choose your route. The two internal corridors branch off at a junction tile, and the game pauses for your decision.
6. The tile you stop on resolves. This is the only tile that does anything to you. Everything it does is spelled out on screen before your turn ends.
7. Play passes on. If that turn completed your last objective, the game ends there and then.

When everyone in the round has taken a turn, the round ends with an activity that everybody plays at once. Then the next round starts. The company announcements call a round a QUARTER, because of course they do.

Every tile, and exactly what it does

The default board is HEAD OFFICE: a loop of 26 tiles around a central atrium, plus two one-way internal corridors that cut across it. There are nine kinds of tile.

RECEPTION

The start tile, and the only one that pays you for passing over it: +5 SV every time you enter it, on the way through or on the way to a stop. Stopping on it does nothing except remind you that your lanyard photo is nine years old.

PAYDAY

Green tiles. You are paid for stopping on them, and three of them also let you breathe.

DEDUCTION

Red tiles. A correction has been applied, and it was never in your favour. Your SV can never go below zero, so a deduction can leave you with nothing but never with a debt.

MEMO

Six tiles on the main loop and one in each corridor, and the signature moment of the game. You draw from a deck of ninety memos: a printed manila page with a title, a body and a stamp. Most are small indignities with a small number attached. Some move you. A few ask you to name a colleague, in which case you get to read the memo before you decide, which is the only fair way to do it.

Memos are drawn without repeats until the deck is exhausted, so a long game keeps finding new ones.

SHAREHOLDERS

Two tiles: THE ATRIUM SCREEN on the main loop, and THE SERVER ROOM inside the fire escape. The shareholder deck is twenty cards and it is colder and bigger than the memo deck. The Board are not being cruel. They are being efficient, and you happen to be in the way.

STATIONERY CUPBOARD

Three tiles: STATIONERY CUPBOARD, THE SUPPLY CLOSET and THE ARCHIVE. Stopping on one hands you a random item. You can hold 3; if your hands are full you are told you are carrying too much already and get nothing.

JUNCTION

Two doors: FIRE ESCAPE DOOR and GOODS LIFT DOOR. If you stop exactly on a junction, nothing happens except that you are standing at the door, and you pick your route at the start of your next move. If you reach the junction with steps still to walk, you choose immediately and carry on.

MEETING ROOM

Two tiles: MEETING ROOM 1 and MEETING ROOM 2. Stopping on one books a 1:1 with a colleague of your choosing, for 8 SV. See the activity section below.

THE BOARD

Three rooms can host the Board: THE BOARDROOM, THE BREAKOUT POD and THE EXECUTIVE FLOOR. The Board only sit in one of them at a time, and which one is marked IN SESSION on the board at all times. All three will sell you an objective, but only the staffed one sells at the advertised price.

Buying objectives from the Board

This is the whole game, so it is worth being precise about it. To deliver an objective you need three things at once:

• You reach a Board room. You do not have to land on it exactly: if your roll carries you through the door and you can afford to present, they intercept you in the corridor and your move ends there.
• You can pay. 15 SV in the room marked IN SESSION, 20 SV in either of the other two, because somebody has to go and find you a slot. Below that and they will not see you, and you walk straight past.
• There is still an objective left on the roadmap for you to claim.

You are then asked whether you want to present. Say yes and the fee leaves your account, the objective is signed off in your name, and the Board immediately relocate to a different room. Nobody gets to camp the same corridor twice, and the cheap room is somewhere else now. Say no and they note your reluctance, which costs you nothing but the opportunity.

That corridor intercept matters more than it sounds. Without it, the only way to deliver anything was to land exactly on one staffed tile out of thirty-four, and testing produced game after game where a player banked fifty SV, enough for three objectives, and delivered none of them. Route choice and money should decide this game. Dice should only decide how long it takes.

A handful of shareholder cards can take an objective back off you. An objective is not a trophy. It is a line in a deck that somebody else controls.

Burnout, and being signed off

Burnout runs from 0 to 5 and is shown as a bar next to your name, with the number on it, so it is never colour alone. The printer, the fire escape and a good number of memos and items push it up. The canteen, the smoking area, the roof terrace and ANNUAL LEAVE pull it down.

Reach 5 and you are signed off with stress: you miss your next turn and come back at 2. You keep your SV, your items and your objectives. It is a tax on pushing too hard rather than a death spiral, and the game does not treat it as a personal failing. Everything else in the building does.

When a skipped turn comes round, the table sees an ABSENT memo explaining that your objectives remain your responsibility. Because of course they do.

The stationery cupboard: all eight items

You hold up to 3 items and play at most one per turn, at the start of your own turn, before you roll. Nothing in the cupboard can hand you an objective outright: items buy you tempo or swing SV, and the Board still has to be reached and paid.

Two notes the table never quite believes. OUT OF OFFICE is a shield: it sits on you until the next hostile thing arrives, absorbs it, and is gone. And SUDDEN REORG ends your move entirely, so you do not roll on the turn you use it: you simply report to wherever the Board are sitting, which is either brilliant or a disaster depending on your balance.

You can see your own items. You can only see how many items everybody else is holding. Knowing exactly who has GOLDEN HANDCUFFS would kill the only tension the lobby has.

The two shortcuts, and what they cost

Both internal corridors are five steps where the loop would be fifteen, and both cut Board tiles out of your route: the fire escape skips two, the goods lift one. Speed costs you objective access, and that trade is the entire reason the doors are there.

The fire escape

Down from FIRE ESCAPE DOOR to FIRE ESCAPE LANDING. Concrete stairs, a dead wasp, and a smell you would rather not identify. On the way you pass two deduction tiles (-3 SV and a point of burnout each), a memo, and THE SERVER ROOM, which is a shareholder tile. It skips two Board tiles, a stationery cupboard, a meeting room and three payday tiles. It is the mean one, and it is often correct.

The goods lift

Up from GOODS LIFT DOOR to GOODS LIFT LANDING. Staff only, which technically is you. One deduction at the LOADING BAY (-3 SV), then THE ARCHIVE for an item, SECURE STORE for a memo, and THE ROOF TERRACE, which is the best tile on the board at +8 SV and a point of burnout off. The catch is that it cuts out RECEPTION, so you give up the +5 SV lap bonus and one Board tile to take it.

The round-end activity

Unless the host switched activities off in the lobby, every round finishes with one that everybody plays at the same time, on their own device, for 10 to 24 seconds. Each is explained in one line and is playable one-handed on a phone. Rewards go by rank:

• 1st: +10 SV
• 2nd: +6 SV
• 3rd: +3 SV
• 4th and below: +1 SV

Exact ties share both the rank and the reward. Anybody who took part gets something, because playing and receiving zero is a worse feeling than losing. Not turning up at all scores nothing, and a no-show always ranks below somebody who submitted a zero.

The game picks one nobody has played yet this match. When the catalogue runs dry it starts again rather than running out.

The 1:1

Stopping on a MEETING ROOM tile books a 1:1. You pick your opponent, the two of you play one activity head to head, and the winner takes 8 SV off the loser.

Two guardrails. The transfer is capped by what the loser actually has, so a 1:1 can never push anybody below zero, and the result you see reflects what really moved. And a draw pays nothing to either side, because no real SV should ever change hands on a coin flip. Everybody else watches, which is the correct amount of involvement in someone else's meeting.

How the game ends

There are two endings.

• Somebody delivers the whole roadmap. The game stops immediately at the end of that turn. They have maximised shareholder value and are, in the only sense the company recognises, a better person.
• The round cap is reached. Eight, twelve or sixteen rounds depending on the preset. The winner is whoever has the most objectives; if that ties, the most SV; if that also ties, the most activity wins. It is deterministic, never random, so who won is never arguable. A genuine dead heat is announced as shared credit, which is the most corporate outcome available.

Either way the full standings are shown with everybody's objectives, SV and activity wins, and the host can call another financial year on the spot. Nothing you achieved carries over.

Turn timers, and going away

Every turn has a clock, set by the preset: 15 seconds on quick, 18 on standard, 20 on long. Decisions such as picking a door, naming a colleague or presenting to the Board get a shorter window of 10 seconds.

If your clock runs out, the game plays the safe move for you rather than stalling the table: it rolls the die, takes the first exit at a door, picks a colleague for you where one is needed, and says yes to the Board, because reaching them with the money is the hard part.

Close the tab and you are marked disconnected after about fifteen seconds. The game carries on taking your turns. Come back to the same link at any time, even mid-game, and you pick up your exact position, SV, items and objectives. If the host is the one who vanishes, the crown moves to another connected human after a few seconds, so a refresh never costs anybody the host controls.

Temps

Empty chairs can be filled with TEMPS, hired by the host in the lobby on a day rate. A temp takes a real turn: it uses items, chooses doors, picks 1:1 opponents, buys objectives and plays the round-end activity at a level tuned to sit where a real player of that activity sits. They are not perfect and they are not pushovers.

This is why two people can play a four-player game, and why one person can play at all. A temp can win. It has happened. A temp never appears on the leaderboard itself, because a temp has no account to appear under, and every finished game records which of its players were temps.

Rooms, codes and quick match

A room is created with a preset, a size from 2 to 6, and a visibility.

• The code is six characters with no letters or digits that look like each other, so it survives being read out over a bad line. Share the code or the link, either works.
• Public rooms are listed on open rooms while they are still in the lobby, so strangers can join.
• Private rooms are never listed. Only people with the code get in.
• Quick match drops you into the fullest open public room that still has a real person in it, or opens a fresh one for you if there is nothing going.

Once the game starts, nobody new can join, but anybody who was in it can rejoin at any time. The host starts the game, hires and releases temps, and calls another game at the end.

The four daily games

Separate from the board game, and playable alone in a couple of minutes. Everybody in the world gets the same puzzle on the same day, and all four reset at midnight UTC. All four dailies are on one page, and past days stay playable if you miss one.

JARGON

Guess the five-letter business word in six. Green means right letter, right place. Yellow means right letter, wrong place. Guesses have to be real corporate vocabulary from the glossary, which is the point: it is a jargon test, not a dictionary attack. Burn four guesses and a hint unlocks. Scoring rewards solving early, and the shareable grid gives away no letters.

VALUATION

Higher or lower, ten times, on market capitalisation. Eleven companies make ten comparisons, and each cap is only revealed once you have committed. No pair is ever a coin flip, and if two companies display at the same rounded figure then either answer counts, because it would be indefensible to punish you for a difference we hid from you. The figures are approximate public information from a fixed snapshot, used for a quiz.

THE AUDIT

Sixteen line items. Four hidden groups of four. Four lives. Three right and one wrong is simply wrong, though the game will tell you when you were one away, which is the most satisfying feedback this format has and also the most annoying.

PAY BANDS

Six jobs. Put them in order of what they actually pay. You are scored out of five on the adjacent orderings you got right, not on exact positions, so one badly misplaced job costs you two points rather than the board. Salaries are approximate published UK figures, used for a quiz, and are not a statement about what any job is worth.

Questions

Start something

Open a room and paste the code into the group chat, or look at what is already running. If you have five minutes rather than twenty, take a daily. If you want to know who is behind this and why, that is on the about page, and you can tell us what is broken whenever you like.

Further reading, if you are choosing something for a group: online multiplayer games, online browser games, online workplace games and office party games. The dull but honest documents are privacy and cookies and terms of use.