Half a million, on an administrator's salary
The fund is how you get out, and the job will never pay it. A bribe turns up roughly one week in twenty. Embezzlement you have to plan, and every method leaves a different amount of it traceable.
JSK Software
Two management games where the committee, the sponsors and the board are the game, and the match is the smaller half. Both playable in a browser now; Steam later.
Head of Referees — 1970s Football
Coming soon on Steam
You run the refereeing department. Six fixtures a week, eighteen slots to fill, and a roster of officials whose real ability nobody will tell you.
The board wants results. The clubs want favours, phrased politely enough to call it relationship management. The union wants their people looked after, the press wants a name, and the disciplinary committee overturns your men on a Tuesday.
There is also a private fund. It needs half a million in it before you are finished, and your salary will not get you there.
Play in the browser →Private playtest — password required
The fund is how you get out, and the job will never pay it. A bribe turns up roughly one week in twenty. Embezzlement you have to plan, and every method leaves a different amount of it traceable.
He asks, politely, that one particular official never works his fixtures again. No money changes hands. Nobody at the table would call it a bribe, and it buys him exactly what a bribe would.
You are not told which one, or when it happened. It shows up months later as a pattern in how he calls a certain club's matches, if you are still looking by then.
Five League men rule on every sending-off your officials give. One club wins its appeals far more often than the rest. Noticing takes a season; proving it is a different problem.
Six clean seasons and you leave respected and poor. Or the fund fills, a note arrives — You have enough. You know what to do. — and one new option appears on the Personal tab: Leave. Tonight.
His level, out of twenty. Attributes are ranges. What the man is actually like stays dark until somebody has worked with him for a season.
Rest, feedback, training. Never rest and your best officials are finished by Christmas. Always rest and you develop nobody, which costs you later and quietly.
Strikes, disorder, the things one country announced and the things another did not. Where you took the job decides what reaches your desk.
More often in some countries than others. The rest age, decline and retire, and take their partnerships and half-taught apprentices with them.
Club Cricket — Division 8 of 8
You are the president, not the coach. You do not pick the side so much as survive the meeting where it gets picked.
You name the club and take it over at the bottom of Division 8, with seventy-nine others above and beside you. Three sides go out every Saturday and a fourth arrives when you go up, a chairman of selectors has opinions you did not ask for, and the captain remembers every time you ignored him.
Win enough and you go up. Lose the room and the AGM removes you, which ends the run rather than the season.
Play the demo in your browser →One season and the whole winter. No password, nothing to install
Play the full game →Private playtest — password required
He asked for a player to be dropped and you picked him anyway. Ignore him twice and he turns passive-aggressive. Three times and he stops hiding it.
Five committee members, each wanting something different from you. Fall below fifty per cent and there is no Continue button — not for the season, for the career.
Four terms to negotiate against a budget you never get to see. Reputation buys you a bigger room, never a better read on it, and overreaching costs about twice what a near miss does.
Your overseas signing arrives with a number attached and nobody under any obligation to make it true. You find out somewhere around the third game.
They can offer him 2nd Grade and you cannot. The better he plays for you, the shorter his time at the club, and there is no fee at this level — he just goes.
It takes a club from your own area sitting in your own division, and that does not line up often. You may wait three seasons for one. Everybody at the club knows when it lands.
Even rounds run across consecutive weekends: declarations, the follow-on, a nightwatchman, and an outright worth close to double what a first-innings win pays.
Your ground decides how often. Lose a run of Saturdays to the weather and the argument for spending on drainage instead of players starts making itself.
Sit through it ball by ball and watch the field move, the spell change and the collapse happen in front of you. Or simulate the round and find out what it cost you on Sunday.