The Provider

The receipt never flatters you.

WORK YOUR WAY UP

Start on the fast-food line at $12 an hour and climb. Or go to trade school at night and come out a licensed plumber with your name on the trucks. Or grind through medical school and spend a decade underwater before the money ever turns. Seventeen jobs, five trades, degrees from associate to master's, and licensing exams you can genuinely fail.

MONEY THAT BEHAVES LIKE MONEY

Index funds and individual stocks. A 401(k) with an employer match you'd be foolish to leave on the table and an early-withdrawal penalty that shows you the full damage before you confirm. Mortgages, refinancing, property taxes. Credit-card interest compounding against you roughly ten times faster than the market compounds for you.

Crypto, if you're feeling brave. Two hundred a month from age eighteen is six figures by your mid-forties; start at thirty and you finish with barely half. The early dollars do the heavy lifting. That's the whole game.

BUILD SOMETHING

Fifteen kinds of business, from a $3,000 food cart to a craft brewery, a dental practice, a boutique hotel, a minor-league ball club. Hire people. Underpay them and watch them leave in the middle of a recession. Set prices, run marketing with honestly diminishing returns, survive inspections and the competitor across the street.

Build a reputation until you earn a real brand — Beloved, Household Name, or Everywhere — each one a different bet. Then promote a veteran to manager and finally work ON the business instead of in it. Fair warning: ownership is a stress engine, heavier than most jobs.

A LIFE,

NOT A SPREADSHEET

Ten states, each a genuinely different game. No income tax in Texas. Hurricanes in Florida — insure the house, seriously. California pays top of market and takes it back in rent. Ohio has the cheapest homes in the game and the most honest work.

Around all of it: a partner, kids, friends who drift if you never call. Kids cost a fortune and are the best investment in the game — one in five has a business spark, and when they pitch you at sixteen, listen. Stress compounds into burnout. Pets pass. Some things you cannot buy your way out of.

51 SCENARIOS

Fixed puzzles with medals to earn. Inherit a dying restaurant with a furious underpaid crew and six grand of debt. Build a company to $250,000 with no loans, no investors, no credit cards — every dollar of growth from a customer. Twenty rental doors. Dig out of an avalanche of debt.

Raise two kids on one income and put them both through college. Gold, silver, bronze, and a clock running.

THE ENDING YOU EARN

You don't retire at an age. You retire when the money will outlast you. Then comes the accounting: net worth, dividends collected, children raised, people still close to you at the end — and a grade from D to S. Your best lives go up on the leaderboard.

YOUR WORLD,

YOUR RULES

Turn off layoffs, hurricanes, medical emergencies, scams, gambling content, even inflation. Every hardship you remove cuts your final score, and customized runs are marked. The top of the board belongs to the hardest hand, played on Hard, with nothing switched off.

Plus 100+ achievements, ten save slots, and a difficulty setting that's honest about what it's worth.

No ads. No accounts. No internet required. Nothing ever leaves your phone.

Fiction, not financial advice.