Minimum Effort
Minimum Effort: Office Sim
Office Politics Game for iPhone
The boss is not the hard part. Twenty two colleagues across the five careers each carry their own trust in you and their own private suspicion, and neither number has to agree with his. You can be invisible to him all day and still be finished by 17:00, because of something you said at the coffee machine at 10:20.
Free. iOS 17.0 or later.
The cast
Six kinds of person, and what each one does with what they saw
The archetype is not a label on a portrait. It sets the traits, it decides which social moves you are allowed to try on them, and above all it decides what they do with a rumour they hear. A snitch forwards it to the boss. A loyal friend swallows it.
| Type | What they are for |
|---|---|
| The accomplice | Lazy, loyal, and a poor witness. He will cover for you, and he wants the same from you. |
| The overachiever | High ambition, no laziness. She notices an unearned win and resents it. |
| The snitch | Low loyalty, high chattiness. Keeps a note of when people leave their desk and does not sit on it. |
| The gossip | Believes everything and repeats it immediately. Has already told two other people. |
| The rival | Wants the rung you want. Startup, consulting and banking each have one. |
| The client | External. Never sees your desk, only ever asks the one question you were supposed to know the answer to. |
Every colleague also carries four fixed traits: ambition, laziness, loyalty and chattiness. Those never move. The two numbers that do move are their trust in you and their private suspicion of you, and 78 percent of what a colleague believes about you survives the night.
The rumour mill
Two retellings and it reaches him from a direction you were not watching
A rumour is a piece of information with a holder, a severity and a hop count. Every time it is passed on, the hop count goes up and the story gets worse: severity is multiplied by a further 35 percent per hop, so away from his desk for a bit has become gone all week by the third telling. A rumour that has been repeated twice reaches the boss no matter who is holding it.
How fast the floor moves it depends on where you work. Investment banking is the quietest at 0.45, because everybody there is too busy. The startup is the loudest at 0.9, because twelve people in one room have nothing else to do with their attention.
| Career | Gossip speed | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Investment banking | 0.45 | Everybody is buried in a model. |
| Corporate | 0.50 | Large enough that news has distance to travel. |
| Consulting | 0.60 | Workstreams, not one room. |
| Home office | 0.75 | Nobody is in the room, and a channel keeps a record. |
| Startup | 0.90 | Twelve people, one room, no structure. |
Five moves
What you can do to a person, and what it costs
Trust is the currency. You earn it with time and spend it on cover. Every move costs minutes out of the same 480 you were trying to protect, which is what makes the social game a real part of the day rather than a menu beside it.
| Move | Minutes | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Ask them to cover for you | 5 | Spends trust to erase the heat you are carrying. They tell the boss you were on a client call. |
| Take credit for their work | 5 | Converts somebody else's finished work into your deliverable. Enormous output. They never forget. |
| Delegate your work | 10 | Spends trust. They deliver real work under your name for the rest of the day. |
| Have a quick chat | 20 | Buys trust, and occasionally returns a rumour you can act on. |
| Actually help them | 40 | The long game. Help in the morning, be covered in the afternoon. |
Two careers, twenty two colleagues, and no sign up.
The betrayal market
Everybody on the floor is running their own small fraud
They do it on their own schedule, in their own corner, and standing in the right place with a clear line of sight is how you find out. What you do with it is the most interesting decision in the game, and there are three answers.
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Say nothing and hold it
They cover for you for free, for as long as it lasts. A piece of leverage stays useful for six days, after which they have either covered their tracks or stopped caring. One perk in the game stops it fading at all.
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Report it
The boss thinks better of you. The entire floor thinks worse. You have traded a private asset for a public one and everybody saw you do it.
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Join in
Twice the return, and one discovery takes both of you down.
What he saw with his own eyes he never entirely forgets. What somebody told him fades.
More about the game