▶ COMING SOON // iOS + ANDROID
Widgetastrophe
Ship first.
Panic later.
Bolt features onto the conveyor to make every widget worth more — and every feature you bolt on is a new way for the widget to catch fire, launch across the room, fill with live bees or walk off the job. Nobody knows what a Widget is. It sells anyway. Safety machines answer each of those disasters, but a safety machine takes a belt tile that could have been earning. Rent comes due every 45 seconds and goes up by about a third every day.
Both store buttons are dead on purpose. The game is on its way to the App Store and Google Play and is not on either yet, so there is nothing behind them to link to — they become real links the day it is live, and not one day earlier.
▶ THE LOOP
HOW IT PLAYS
The features that sell best are the ones that catch fire.
Widgets ride the belt left to right and sell at the end. Every machine you bolt onto a tile adds dollars to every widget that passes it — and hands that widget one new way to go wrong. You are not fighting the factory. You are deciding how much of it you can afford to have on fire at once.
-
THE BELT
TILES ARE THE BUDGET
A shift starts with a short conveyor and a little cash. You buy more tiles, and you bolt a machine onto a tile. Every tile you spend on not going wrong is a tile that isn't making money, and that trade is the whole game.
-
FEATURES
MORE IS WORSE, PROFITABLY
Each feature machine adds its dollars to every widget that passes it, and its risk to every widget that passes it. Chrome is harmless and pays $6. A Free Will Module pays $160 and the widget starts having opinions.
-
THE INCIDENTS
SEVEN WAYS TO LOSE ONE
Glitter gunks the belt. Bevels slice it. Airbags, springs and rockets launch the widget across the room, where it clangs off your other machines. Lithium and smart chips set the tile alight and fire spreads. Bees escape and shut a machine down. Helium floats the widget up off the belt, and the ceiling keeps whatever reaches it. Free will walks it back to the intake.
-
YOUR HANDS
TAP THE TROUBLE
Tap a fire to fight it and hold to keep spraying. Tap a swarm to shoo it off the machine it's sitting on. Tap a floater to pop it before the ceiling gets it. And a mutinous widget takes three pep talks before it turns around and goes back to work.
-
THE CLOCK
RENT IS DUE
A day is 45 seconds long and it ends with rent. Rent grows by about a third every day, so a factory that was comfortable on day three is bankrupt on day seven unless it grew too. Growth is the only stable state.
-
GOING BROKE
A SLIGHTLY CHEAPER YOU
Miss rent and the board replaces you with a slightly cheaper you. The way out is a Bailout — half the next rent plus a cushion, bought with Bolts, or taken once a run for an opt-in video instead. The second Bailout in a run costs double the first.
▶ ELEVEN FEATURE MACHINES
WHAT YOU BOLT ON
Every one of these is a real card in the shop, with its real price on the widget and its real way of ruining your afternoon. Six of the eleven are below; the Precision Bevelizer, the Airbag Stuffer, the Spring Loader 3000, the Overclocked Smart Chip and the Rocket Assist Module are the rest. Copies get more expensive each time — 1.45× the last one — so a wall of the same machine is never the answer.
-
+$6 A PASS
Chrome-Everything Buffer
“Adds no function whatsoever. Reviews improved 40%.” The one honest machine in the catalogue — no risk at all, which is exactly why it pays so little.
-
+$9 A PASS
Glitter Dip Tank
“Legally a coating. Practically a permanent resident of your factory.” Gunks up the belt, and gunk slows every widget that has to crawl over it.
-
+$52 A PASS
Lithium Cell Injector
“Nine cells per widget. The ninth is what marketing calls ‘the fun one.’” Catches fire — and fire spreads to the tiles either side.
-
+$100 A PASS
Helium Bladder
“Lighter than air. Also lighter than the warranty.” The widget inflates and drifts up off the belt, and the ceiling keeps whatever reaches it.
-
+$125 A PASS
Live Bee Compartment
“Focus groups did not ask for this. Focus groups pay 4x for it.” A swarm escapes, picks a machine, sits on it and shuts it down until somebody shoos it off.
-
+$160 A PASS
Free Will Module
“The widget now has goals. None of them are ‘be shipped.’” It turns around and walks back to the intake, pushing the whole queue behind it.
▶ SEVEN SAFETY MACHINES
SAFETY COSTS A TILE
Safety machines earn nothing. They take a tile, they cover the tiles around them, and each one answers a named disaster or two and nothing else — so the layout question is which disasters you have decided to keep. The seventh is the QA Bench, which cuts the risk of everything downstream of it by 45% and the sale value by 15%: it finds the dangerous parts and removes them, and those were the good parts.
-
THIS TILE ±1
Sprinkler Head
“Also soaks the paperwork, which honestly helps.” Fights fire on its own tile and the two beside it, without you having to be looking.
-
THIS TILE ±1
Blast Netting
“Catches the widget and puts it back. Slightly embarrassed.” Catches launches and floaters before the room does.
-
THIS TILE ±1
Janitor Drone Dock
“Employee of the month, eleven months running. Cannot receive the award.” Clears glitter and patches tears nearby.
-
±2 TILES
Apiarist on Retainer
“Expensive. Calm. Has never once explained where the bees go.” Bees within two tiles are handled four times faster.
-
THIS TILE ±1
Blast Trampoline
“OSHA called it ‘a trampoline.’ We call it Recovery Infrastructure.” Bounces fallen widgets back up onto the belt instead of letting the floor have them.
-
±2 TILES
Motivational Poster
“HANG IN THERE. The widget reads it. The widget reconsiders.” Talks mutineers round so you don't have to give three pep talks by hand.
▶ THREE WAYS IN
THE MODES
One is a campaign that introduces the disasters one at a time and then stops being polite. One takes the roster the campaign has unlocked and runs it until you go broke. The last is the same shift, with the same twist, for everybody on earth, once a day.
-
MODE 01
40 CONTRACTS
Five districts, eight contracts each: Widget Co. (est. this morning), The Fun Ones (features that deploy), Thermal Events (the brochure calls this warmth), Livestock (bees, obviously bees) and Free Will (the widget has decided otherwise). Each contract has a goal, a deadline and two bonus stars you will not get on the first go, and most of them add a rule twist on top.
-
MODE 02
ENDLESS SHIFT
Everything the campaign has unlocked, no goal, no deadline, and rent that keeps compounding. It ends when you can't make rent, because that is the only ending it has. Never interrupted by an ad — there is no cleared state for one to land on.
-
MODE 03
DAILY SHIFT
Five days, seeded from the date, identical on every device on earth — same widgets, same dice, same twist of the day (two of them every third day). Scored on sales. The streak counts days you played, not days you won, because showing up is the part we can fairly ask of you.
▶ THE HONEST BIT
WHAT IT COSTS
Widgetastrophe is free with ads. The ad rules below are conditions in the code, not intentions in a blog post: the placement cubit has exactly one placement, and it is the moment you leave a cleared contract's results card.
-
FREE // AD-SUPPORTED
ADS, ON A LEASH
A full-screen ad can appear only after a contract you cleared. Never after a loss, never after the Daily Shift, never in Endless, and never during play. Your first three cleared contracts are never interrupted at all, then it's at most every second clear, never inside two minutes of the last one, and four in a session is the hard stop.
-
ONE-TIME PURCHASE
REMOVE ADS
Buy it once and the between-contract ad never appears again. The opt-in video stays available, so you can still trade thirty seconds for a Bailout if you want one — you just never get shown an ad you didn't ask for.
-
THE HEX NUT
BOLTS
Bolts are earned by clearing contracts, turning up for the Daily and surviving Endless days. They buy Bailouts, Quiet Hours (a day with no interruption ads) and factory palettes — Day Shift and Night Shift are free, Blueprint, Bubblegum Plant, Rustbelt and Mint Condition are 500 each. Bolt packs exist for anyone who would rather buy the nuts than earn them.
A Bailout is the revive, and it is the one thing money touches that isn't cosmetic — which is why it is also available once a run for an opt-in video, at no cost, in every mode. Palettes repaint the factory and change nothing about what a widget is worth.
▶ ON THE RECORD
YOUR DATA STAYS YOURS
There is no account, no sign-in and no server of ours to talk to. The whole game is a simulation running on your own device, in portrait or landscape, on a plane if you like — progress, Bolts, stats, streaks and saved shifts sit in your phone's own storage and go when the app goes. It asks for no camera, no microphone, no location and no contacts. Two things reach the network at all: Google's ad network, which serves the ads, and the App Store or Google Play, which handle purchases — we never see payment details. The full, plainly-worded version lives on the privacy page, the same one we file with both stores.