The Studio

About
Us

A small studio making games about judgment under uncertainty. This page is what we would tell you over a drink, not what a brand consultant would write.

Screwcap Games, LLC

§ 01

What we make

6 games you can play right now, and one more still in the workshop. They look like different genres — a Fed simulator, two dominoes games, a Korean card game, a commodities game, a household-budget game, a lifetime tracker — but they are all the same game underneath: you have to decide before you can see, and then you have to live inside the consequence.

That is the through-line and it is not decoration. Every one of them measures something about your judgment rather than your reflexes, and most of them will tell you how much of your result was actually luck. It turns out that is the part almost nobody builds, and it is the part that teaches.

Why the games are grounded in real data: invented crises let the player off. Volcker’s 1979 was harder than anything we would have dared make up, and it has the enormous advantage of having actually happened.

§ 02

Who we are

Screwcap Games is a one-man band making games about the things I actually care about: money, strategy, improvement, competition, and the strange pleasure of getting a little better at something every day.

TheChair (www.chairmanmode.app) began as FlyMacroPilot: a macroeconomics game about flying an economy through a storm — after a break-up, because apparently I enjoy calm hobbies. The core idea survived, grew up, and became a more ambitious game about making decisions when every economic lever has consequences.

Gold Digger was inspired by time spent in Southern Europe and a simple, dangerous thought: if the news moves markets, people should be able to learn how that works before using real money. It is paper trading for commodities — part game, part education, part antidote to confidently buying something because a man on television shouted about copper.

Sutda is a nod to a Korean-American friend: one of the few people I know who, like me, is still actively working to make his life better well into adulthood. It is also simply a fast, fun distraction when your brain needs five minutes off the clock.

DoubleFives grew from Sister Wendy and its RaceHorse domino roots. We added machine-learning and AI assistance to build the ultimate domino experience — solo or online — with tools that help you understand the count, improve your play, and eventually compete through a proper Elo ranking system across the variants you love.

DTTAU — Do Things That Add Up — came from a friend who has lifted more than 5,000 pounds a week for twenty years. The point is not merely the gym; it is seeing what steady effort becomes when you stop treating it as invisible. Small actions compound. So do big ones.

Kitchen Table, The Library, and TheHeir came from a lifetime of watching family, friends, employees, and myself wrestle with money. These games are about developing a healthy relationship with it: building stability first, then wealth, then the judgment to preserve and grow it.

Screwcap Games, LLC is the company underneath all of it. The AI opponents are ours: trained by self-play on our own hardware, not bought in and not built from anything players did. They see exactly what you see. When one of them beats you it is because it counted better, and where we can, the game will show you the count.

§ 03

How we pay for it

Three ways, all of them visible on the site rather than inferred. Advertising on free tiers — placed on menus and end screens, never in the middle of a decision, because an ad between you and the choice the game is about is a tax on the only thing we are selling. Optional one-time unlocks and paid plans. And sponsorship, which is priced publicly.

Every measurement and advertising vendor we run is named individually in the Privacy Policy, per property, with its actual ID printed. If a tool sets a cookie it is in that list. Paying removes the ads and the cookies they set — that is the trade, in both directions.

The honest target is a drink at the end of the day, not a yacht. If the yacht ever materialises you will be able to tell, because the privacy policy will have got much longer and much worse.

§ 04

What we will not do

We do not sell your data, broker profiles of you, or train models on your play. We do not run loot boxes, energy timers, or any mechanic whose job is to make waiting unpleasant enough that you pay to stop it. We do not gate a leaderboard — depth is a paid feature, ranking is not.

What we also will not do is pretend the free tiers run quietly. Google (Analytics, AdSense) and the Meta Pixel run on the free version of most of our games — named individually, per property, with real IDs, in the Privacy Policy, not buried under a generic “analytics” label. We priced the paid tiers to be affordable specifically so that trade is easy to opt out of: buying removes the ads and the ad network’s cookies. That is rolling out game by game, not everywhere at once yet — the Privacy Policy says exactly where it is live today.

And we do not ship a game whose numbers we cannot defend. Where a figure on screen is illustrative rather than measured, the game says so. Where a build is unfinished, its page says so — The Library is labelled in the workshop for exactly that reason.

§ 05

Talk to us

Bugs, corrections, licensing, press, or an argument about a rule: play@screwcapholdings.com. A real person reads it. Corrections to data or history get answered first — if a chart in one of our games is wrong, we want to know before a player does.