About TycoonForge
Kids meet exponential growth and manipulative monetization long before anyone names either — inside the idle games they already play. TycoonForge makes both visible: your child builds the money loop, watches it compound, then decides, as the designer, how it should (and shouldn't) make money.
Compounding, by building it
Three dials drive a reinvestment loop: each upgrade multiplies output, and the bigger output buys the next upgrade sooner — a curve that bends upward. That's compounding, the same maths behind savings and populations, felt from the inside instead of read off a slide.
The money turn: four ways to pay
Once the loop is fun, TycoonForge asks how a game is paid for — because every game is paid for somehow. Four real business models, each with a real example and its trade-off: sell it once (Minecraft), a subscription (Apple Arcade), ads (many free phone games), and things to buy inside (Fortnite’s costumes; elsewhere, a way to skip a wait or a paid crate with a random prize). Then one question with reasons, not a score: in which of these can a game earn more by making playing more annoying?
The Timer Rule
When a game sells the way out of a wait, the wait becomes the product. That is why every Spark & Anvil game follows the Timer Rule — no wait can be bought, nothing you built rots. It is a house rule we explain, not a finding we claim to have proved. (Our games are free, with no ads and nothing to buy, so the rule is easy for us; a company that must earn from its game has harder choices.)
What it's good for (and what we don't claim)
TycoonForge is practice in systems thinking (feedback + compounding) and in reading a game's incentives. The examples are real and sourced; the game itself is a toy model, and we make no claim it changes how a child spends — it's a lab for seeing how game economies work.
Safe by design
- Deterministic + on-device. The whole sim runs in your browser — no network, no accounts, nothing sent anywhere.
- No dark patterns — and it's about them. No timer, no streak, no score, nothing to buy; the manipulation is the subject, never the product.
- Progress stays with you. Kept in your browser only.