Exploring TycoonForge together ⚙️
Idle "tycoon" games are everywhere your child plays — and they teach compounding by accident, then quietly sell shortcuts. TycoonForge puts your child on the other side of the counter: first as the engineer who builds the loop, then as the designer who has to decide how (and whether) it makes money.
1 · Build a loop that snowballs
Three dials — sell price, upgrade boost, and how fast the next upgrade costs more — control a little machine. Your child predicts how it will feel (a boring grind, a steady climb, or over-in-seconds), runs 8 game-minutes, and sees the curve. That upward bend is compounding: each upgrade multiplies output, which pays for the next upgrade sooner.
2 · Read the loop with Cog
Cog the beaver reads the machine as a stock-and-flow — the systems-thinking picture underneath every economy. Getting to a "steady climb" means balancing the accelerators (price, boost) against the brake (cost climb).
3 · The money question
Once the game is fun, Cog asks how a game gets paid for. There are four ways: sell it once, a subscription, ads, or things to buy inside. Each card has a real example and its trade-off. Then one question, answered with reasons: in which can a game earn more by making playing more annoying?
4 · Why our games follow the Timer Rule
If a game sells a way to skip a wait, a longer wait sells more skips. That's why every Spark & Anvil game follows the Timer Rule: no wait can be bought, and nothing you built rots away. We explain the rule; we don't claim to have proved it.
The game is a toy model; the four examples are real and sourced. No timers, no streaks, no score. On-device — nothing leaves your device.