Redundant

About this game

Redundant is a card game about being made redundant by AI, played one week at a time. You get a card, you get two choices, and then it is next week. A full run takes three to five minutes and there is no difficulty curve, because the bleakness is deliberately flat.

Three meters run the whole thing, all starting at 50. The Dole is money, and at zero you are evicted and the run ends there, though there is no upper limit on it. The Neck is dignity, and at zero you are locked into the founder branch for good. The Drink is coping, and it cuts both ways: too sober and the Dole drains faster while the spiralling cards start appearing, too numb and the opportunity cards stop turning up at all.

The deck remembers

Twenty-four cards are shuffled and drawn without replacement across eighteen weeks, so no run repeats itself. Some cards are gated on the state of your meters and others on what you already did, which is why you cannot get the journey post unless you posted once already. The writing is the game: the bank ringing to ask if you are still between things, an old manager offering a reference, a LinkedIn account that asks you to confirm twice, gently.

There are five endings, and they are all landings rather than wins. The Plumber earns more than he ever did in tech. The Founder sells the course that failed him. Home puts the boxes in the parents’ attic and calls it consulting. The Good One is a grand aul job, in out, home for six, and nobody made a documentary about it. Still Between Things is exactly what it sounds like.

Nothing is saved. There is no localStorage, no account and no score to carry forward, so the run exists for as long as the tab does.