About

What this is

Shareholder Party is a free browser game about work. You play an employee in a large, indifferent British company. You walk laps of a floorplan, you are paid small amounts for being in the right place, larger amounts are taken off you for reasons that are never quite your fault, and you spend everything that is left buying objectives from a Board who move rooms the moment you deliver one.

There is a board game for two to six players and there are four daily puzzles. The rules are all written down on how it works. This page is the other thing: why it exists.

Why it exists

Three things about modern work are so widely shared that they stopped being remarkable, and all three are funnier as mechanics than as complaints.

The objectives mean nothing. Every objective in this game is real in form and empty in substance: SYNERGIES REALISED, CULTURE EMBEDDED, WELLBEING INITIATIVE LAUNCHED. A poster in a stairwell with a mountain on it. A fruit bowl and a webinar and no change to your workload. In the game, delivering one costs you everything you have saved and gives you nothing you can use. That is not an exaggeration for comic effect. That is the whole observation.

The value goes upward. The currency is Shareholder Value, and the point of the currency is that it is not yours. You generate it at fourteen degrees in a server room and you hand it over in a room with water in glass bottles and sixteen chairs, four of them used. The winner is whoever transferred the most.

Burnout is treated as your fault. In the game there is a meter, and when it fills you are signed off with stress, and an ABSENT memo goes round the office explaining that your objectives remain your responsibility. Nobody asks why the meter filled. The printer is not audited. The fire escape is still the fastest way down.

Put together, those three things make a game where the mechanics are the argument. Nobody has to be told the joke, because everybody playing has already lived in it.

The target is the system, not the people in it

This matters enough to state flatly. The satire is aimed at structures: management layers, quarterly targets, process, restructures, shareholder primacy, the language companies use when they are doing something they would rather not describe accurately. It is never aimed at workers, and never at a person's job, accent, salary, nationality, gender or identity.

That is a design constraint, not a disclaimer. It rules things out. There is no mechanic where players judge or rate each other, no vote to push somebody out, no reveal of personal information, no punching downward, and nothing crude. Every player is on the same side of the joke, which is the side the joke is not aimed at. The Board are the antagonist and the Board never appear as a person, only as a card and an empty chair.

The one thing the game does ask of you is to be slightly awful to your colleagues for twenty minutes, with GOLDEN HANDCUFFS and a filed HR complaint. Being made to compete against people in your own position, for a number that benefits neither of you, is also part of the observation.

Not affiliated with anybody

Shareholder Party is fiction. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any real company, employer or organisation. If something in it resembles your specific employer, that is a coincidence and, more likely, evidence that the practice is not unusual. No real person is depicted. No real internal document has been reproduced.

Two of the daily games use real-world information, so it is worth being clear about them. The company names and market capitalisations in VALUATION, and the job titles and salary figures in PAY BANDS, are approximate public information used as quiz material and nothing more. They are drawn from published sources, they are indicative, they are rounded, and they go out of date. Their inclusion is not an endorsement, a criticism, or a claim about any company as an employer, and it is certainly not a statement about what anybody's work is worth. Nothing on this site is financial, investment, career or employment advice, as the terms say at greater length.

Who made it

One person, in evenings and weekends. There is no team, no company behind it, no investors and no roadmap of its own beyond fixing things and writing more cards.

It runs entirely in your browser. There is nothing to install, no launcher and no app store. Guests can play without an account, an account exists only so streaks and stats survive a new phone, and the whole thing is free. If advertising is running it is there to cover hosting, and it never appears during a live turn or an activity. Privacy and cookies explains, in specific terms, the small amount of data involved.

Tell us what is wrong with it

A bug, an event card that lands badly, a wrong answer in a daily, a colour combination that is unreadable, a control that does not work with a keyboard: all of it is useful and all of it gets read. Contact is one small form and no account required.

Otherwise: start a game, look at what is running, take a daily puzzle, or read the rules. If you are trying to pick something for a group, there is honest advice in online workplace games, office party games, online multiplayer games and online browser games.