Core Gameplay

CEO Game turns all of this into a world you can practise in again and again. Here, success has a formula:

The four factors multiply, so any weak one holds back the whole; time sits in the exponent, so good decisions compound — and so do bad ones. Here is how you run each of the five in the game.

Strategy: start from an empty plot

Your company begins with a single farm on the map. Plant your first seeds, open your first shop, turn your harvest into your first revenue. As your experience grows, new land and buildings unlock: mills, bakeries, factories, restaurants… all the way to cars and aerospace. Every supply chain links to the next — what to make, where to make it, whom to sell to and at what price: the path is yours to choose.

Capital: real markets, real books

On the exchange you trade alongside other players and AI competitors; in your stores, customers vote on your prices with real demand. Every transaction is booked in standard double-entry accounting, producing a balance sheet, income statement and cash-flow statement. Run out of cash and the best plan stops; what your company is worth comes down to its net assets and earning power.

Short of cash? Borrow from the bank (5% a day, up to 80% of your net assets) or issue bonds to other players. Every company carries a credit rating from AAA to D — the better it is, the cheaper you borrow. Cash to spare? Buying another company's bonds lends it money for interest — and takes on the risk that it defaults.

Technology: make a product the world has never seen

With enough experience you can build an Innovation Lab, invest in research, raise your products' tech levels — and walk the ABCD loop of generative entrepreneurship:

• Aware — see what the market is missing.
• Build — design a product that has never existed: set its recipe and make a prototype.
• Connect — put the prototype in front of other players and invite them to visit your lab.
• Drive — once enough people are willing to buy in, your invention is granted a patent. From then on, anyone who wants to make it must first buy a license from you.

Opportunities are not found; they are created, one commitment at a time.

Organization: build your executive team

Hire a CTO, CFO, CMO and more to sit on your board. Each brings their strengths and genuinely changes your company's efficiency and costs. Good people are in demand — you can poach talent, and you must guard against having yours poached. Join or found a guild to collaborate, trade and compete side by side; the same strategy can end very differently in different hands.

Time: every step compounds

Every building, batch, sale and decision adds to your experience and CEO capabilities. Small early choices, magnified by time, become decisive paths — and you will watch their chain reactions unfold.

Walk a real entrepreneur's road

Choose one of 23 origin stories as your life's opening, make choices in conversation and find your own path; follow the Travel Atlas along real trade routes, understand them, then run them yourself. Academy courses and Fang Jie, your mentor, help newcomers find their feet.

Prove yourself in the Arena

How good a manager are you, really? Enter the Arena for quarter-by-quarter business contests: pricing, capacity, marketing and financing, settled each quarter. You can also bring it into a classroom or corporate training as a workshop.

Three abilities you will build here

• See the system — understand how a business runs and changes, and find the variables that matter.
• Reshape the structure — change how resources, organization and strategy fit together to put your company on a new growth path.
• Master time — keep correcting course as things change, set good loops in motion, and let compounding work for you.

It is a game — and a practice ground for business insight and self-awareness.

Play instantly in the browser, or download the Android app.