Airline Director vs Minimum Effort

You take over a small airline. One week at a time, you turn it into a name that appears on departure boards. Lease your first jet or buy it outright. Fight for a slot pair at a major hub, or fly from an airport nobody has heard of. Open a route, set the fare, and find out on Sunday night whether you were right. WEEK BY WEEK Every turn is one week. Make your decisions, hit Advance Week, and read the report: who flew, what they paid, what it cost you, and how much you kept. Five minutes or fifty — the game waits. YOUR AIRLINE, YOUR CURRENCY An airline keeps its books where it is based. Start in Manchester and you report in pounds, in Amsterdam in euros, in Nairobi or Newark in dollars — down to the pence, cents and RASK on every route. EVERY NUMBER IS EXPLAINED No hidden dice. Every route shows its RASK, its CASK and the gap between them. If your load factor drops, the game tells you why: a rival added frequency, your punctuality slipped, or you priced yourself out. If you cannot explain a number, it is not doing its job. THE THREE THINGS YOU ARE ALWAYS SHORT OF Cash, because aircraft cost tens of millions and leases fall due whether anyone flew or not. Slots, because you need one at both ends and good airports have none to spare. Block hours, because every airframe has a ceiling and pushing past it breaks your punctuality, your maintenance and your crew. Every real decision in the game is a trade between those three. BUILD A FLEET Turboprops, narrowbodies, widebodies and ultra-long-range twins. Buy outright, finance it, or lease — each with a different shape of pain. Watch condition, book the heavy checks before they book themselves, and reconfigure the cabin when the market moves. RUN A NETWORK Sixty-plus airports and hundreds of city pairs. Set frequency, assign the aircraft, price three cabins by hand or hold a position against the market and let revenue management do it. Declare a base and watch two routes start feeding each other. THE OFFICE Hire a chief executive, a network planner, a head of engineering. Sign catering and ground handling contracts — cheap costs you something that is not money. Take on debt, raise equity, float the airline. Buy a rival if you can afford one. CLIMB THE LADDER Eight tiers, from Air Taxi to Global Network Carrier, each gated on rating, reputation, fleet, network and net worth. Around 150 rival carriers hold the ranks above and below you. At the end of every 52-week year, a graded season review from the board, the passengers and the crew. Open-ended. No win condition, no timers, no ads. Three save slots. Play it for an afternoon or for four in-game decades. Airline Director is a work of fiction. Airlines, aircraft and market conditions in the game are invented or simplified for play, and nothing in it is aviation, business or financial advice.

You have a job. You do not want to do it. Minimum Effort is a satirical workplace strategy game. Every workday runs from 09:00 to 17:00, and everything you can do with those 480 minutes trades three things against each other: the time it saves you, the output it actually produces, and how conspicuous it makes you. The goal is not to be good at your job. It is to find the least amount of work that survives. HOW A DAY WORKS • Do the work, fake the work, or avoid it entirely. Looking busy covers part of a shortfall when the boss checks the deliverables. It never files the report. • The boss patrols the floor. When he walks past in the middle of something you get a couple of seconds to look busy . and less time the hotter you already are. • Repeat an act and it gets riskier every time. The fourth bathroom break is not the first bathroom break. • Colleagues talk. Each one has their own trust in you and their own doubts, and a rumour that crosses the floor twice reaches the boss's office from a direction you were not watching. THE PEOPLE Your accomplice will cover for you. The overachiever notices an unearned win. The snitch keeps a note of when people leave their desk. The gossip has already told two other people. You can chat, delegate your work, ask somebody to cover, genuinely help them . or put your name on their work, which they never forget. PROMOTIONS ARE A TRAP Every rung on the ladder pays more and expects more. Getting promoted is easy. Staying just competent enough not to be fired, one rung higher, with a bigger quota and the same amount of effort . that is the game. FIVE CAREERS - Corporate. Easy. Meetings, decks and a quarterly review nobody reads. - Startup. Chaotic. Twelve people, no structure, and everybody notices everything. - Consulting. Medium. Frameworks, workstreams, and never being the one with the answer. - Investment banking. Extreme. Enormous money, enormous work, and an associate who never leaves. - Home office. Nobody can see you and everything is measured. The green dot is your new boss and it cannot be charmed. Corporate and Startup are included. Consulting and Investment Banking are unlocked together by the Career Pack. Home Office is its own pack. Both are one purchase each, not a subscription, nothing recurring, and either one removes the advertising. THE ONLY SCORE THAT MATTERS Total money earned, divided by hours you actually worked. Retire at the top of a ladder having been paid for years and worked for weeks, and the number on your record board will say so. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account and no sign-in. Your careers are saved on your device and nothing about them leaves it. It does show advertising, which Google's ad kit loads over the network, and either pack removes it. Minimum Effort is a work of satire. The offices, the colleagues and the careers are invented, and nothing in it is advice about a real job. Recommendations for our other apps load online. Their views and taps are counted as daily totals, without personal profiles or user/device identifiers. See our privacy policy.