How to Play "Spend It All By Midnight"

Ninety seconds. Twenty million dollars. Four meters pulling against each other, and fourteen endings. A small game about how spending money is harder than saving it.

The rules

Leadership has announced that the offsite budget was raised to $20 million. It has to be gone by midnight, or next year's budget gets cut in half. You run Workplace Ops. You have ninety seconds.

Reading the four meters

Budget left should finish as close to zero as possible. Employee morale hitting zero triggers an attrition ending. Leadership approval falling too low gets you moved to a strategy role. Finance suspicion climbing too high triggers an audit. The difficulty is that all four fight each other: money that actually reaches employees costs you approval, spending that flatters leadership costs you morale, and anything hard to justify drives suspicion up.

Species are not skins

You pick what kind of employee you are before the clock starts, and each species carries a real modifier. Dog: flattery works 35% better. Ox: morale drops at half speed. Hamster: finance suspicion grows 40% slower. Goose: money to staff hits 40% harder, and so does annoying leadership. Same purchase list, four different optimal lines.

The zero-cost options are a real strategy

Three items cost nothing: cancel a recurring meeting, skip the leadership photo op, and let everyone leave two hours early on Fridays. They raise morale sharply without consuming budget, which sounds free — except leftover budget is also a losing ending. Deciding when to spend a turn on them is the actual game.

Random events

Two or three events fire per run, plus a scramble in the last seconds. The clock pauses while an event is open, so there's no need to rush the choice.

Hidden endings

Four of the fourteen endings are hidden, including landing the full twenty million on exactly zero.

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