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The living player guide for Rookport, a persistent crime MMO in development. It describes what's actually in the game right now — see the Roadmap for what's coming.

Rookport — Player Guide

A living guide to how Rookport plays and every feature currently in the game. Kept in step with the build; the eventual source for the public wiki. Numbers marked "(tuning)" are placeholders being balanced and may change.

Rookport is a browser-based, persistent-world mob game. You run one boss in a shared 1920s-style port city, building a criminal empire in real time alongside everyone else. The world keeps ticking whether you're logged in or not — income accrues, heat cools, wounds heal, crews get paid. Play is asynchronous and turn-limited: almost everything you do costs action points, which regenerate slowly over real time.

Play at https://rookport.com.

Getting started

📓 Somebody left you a note. The first time you open the game, a fixer called Sal (just Sal: nobody else in Rookport carries the name) hands you a book of small jobs — eight contracts that walk you from an honest wage through your first crime, your first gun, your first car, your first crew and your first building, out into the wider city and, last, through a hold-up nobody reports — and leave you knowing what to do next. It is the fastest way into the game, and it is not a tutorial: there is no scripted sandbox and no overlay pointing at buttons. Every job is completed by doing the actual thing in the actual city, at the actual cost.

The eight contracts, in order: Off the boat (the city, your room, a wage) · Sticky fingers (your first crime, heat, fencing) · Tooled up (gear, stats, skills) · Something to drive (a car and its boot) · A crew of your own (recruiting and arming men) · A front of your own (a business with books — a legal front; a house doesn't count — property, income, the trade) · The city is not empty (the phone, a fight, a family) · Nobody saw a thing (the witnesses: hold up a place while it is open, stop a witness before he calls — warn him off, beat him down or finish him — and walk out with the haul with nobody calling the police; $750).

Nobody saw a thing comes last, and the rule comes early. It sits at the end of the book so that a player who won't rob a shop never stalls on it before his car, his crew and his front. Contract two already tells you the rule, on its first job: nobody phones the police over a wallet — a killing or a hold-up is different: whoever sees it calls, unless you stop him. Its three jobs are things you did, not places you went, so they are ticked whenever you did them — a hold-up from the side jobs counts, and so does a witness you warned off before the chapter opened. Walk out with the haul, and nobody calls needs somebody to have seen you: a hold-up of an empty room teaches nothing, and every witness of it has to be stopped by you or your men (warned off, or beaten down in a fight with you). (See Witnesses under A straight life.)

Sal's side jobs — every way the city pays. The book has a second page: Side jobs, one line for every way to make money in Rookport — your job · a pocket at the right hour · robbing a man · a hold-up · a break-in · a delivery truck · a car driven to the docks · a street deal · a trade run · protection · a front's takings · rent · a dealer on your crew. Each line says, in Sal's words, how it works, where and when — before you try it. It isn't a sequence and nothing on it is locked: do them in any order, or never. The first time one actually pays you — money in your hand, or something worth money (a phone out of a pocket, a load off a truck, a car out of a showroom); not a try, not a botch, not a job that ends in a cell or a hospital bed — Sal sends you a note with a tip for doing it better, and $100 clean into your bank. Once a line, ever: $1,300 if you do them all. The tip stays on the page once that line has paid. New ways to earn join the list as they're built. On screen: Boss › Contracts, the switch at the top — Contracts | Side jobs. Each line shows how it works, what it pays in (clean, dirty cash, or goods), whether it has paid you yet, and Sal's tip once it has; the page counts how many have paid you, and the Side jobs switch shows a brass "new" pip when a tip has come in since you last looked. Sal's note also comes into Contacts › Chat › Alerts (unless you've turned Business alerts off).

Your first portrait is free — make it count, because re-rolls will be a paid option later. Nothing is spent unless a picture actually comes back: a refusal, an outage or a failed sitting hands your free portrait straight back. You can skip the step entirely (Later, let me in) and claim it later from Boss › Stats & skills, where the same step opens without the sign-up rail and its skip button reads Not now. During sign-up, beside the frame, the step also shows what your new boss starts with, straight from the game: where he stands, his clean and dirty money, his room and its rent, his starter job and its wage, his actions and how fast they refill, his health, and that he is protected until his first crime. Your portrait is drawn in high definition, and the game keeps the whole picture.

Actions — your turn budget

Nearly every meaningful move — travelling, committing a crime, robbing, working out at the gym — spends action points (buying property is the exception: it costs clean money from the bank, not actions). You start with half a full meter — 250 — as a new boss and at every new round: a full first evening of play (it was a tenth, 50, until 2026-10-01: a walk across town and a few crimes, then three and a half hours' wait). Then you regenerate toward your maximum over real time. You can't stockpile past your max, so spend them.

Everyone gets the same actions. Every boss's maximum is 500, and an empty meter fills in 36 hours — about 14 actions an hour, online or not. That's the same for everybody: nothing speeds it up — not your level, not your family, not a stronghold, not gear. Levelling up gives you stat and skill points, never a bigger meter. The one extra is the round head start: finish a round in the top ten and you open the next one with your meter already topped up (see Rankings).

Travel is the big line on that budget: 3 actions per block (tuning — it was 5 until 2026-09-02, which made a walk across a few streets cost most of what a new boss owned). A six-block errand is 18; crossing the whole city is about 90. Driving is cheaper as well as faster — the cost scales with your car's speed, and every point of Driving trims it further, up to −40%. The trip card prices the walk against the drive before you commit to either.

There's a dev refill cheat during the prototype (see the end), but in normal play, actions are the throttle on how much you can do per day.

Your character

Primary stats — the four you level up. Every level hands you 2 points to put wherever you like (nothing is auto-assigned), so the climb from 1 to 10 is 18 points of your own choosing. (A level doesn't raise your action maximum — that's 500 for everyone.)

Your level is your standing. There is no separate reputation stat — the number at the top of your screen is the whole answer to "how big is this man's name". It sets how intimidating you are, sharpens your buy and sell prices by 1% a level, and decides who you can put on your payroll (never anyone above your own level). (There used to be a second stat called Respect that did all this; it was removed on 2026-09-03 because it only ever moved when your level did, and one number you can see beats two you have to track.)

Everyone else wears a level too. Every person on a block — passer-by, shopkeeper, gangster, cop, SWAT — and every rival boss shows a Lv on their row and in the viewer, so you can size somebody up before you swing at them. Roughly: 1 is a passer-by, 2 a shopkeeper, 4 a gangster, 6 a beat cop, 9 a SWAT officer. It measures how dangerous that person is, not whether the fight is fair — the law is dangerous because it arrives in numbers, not because one officer is unbeatable.

Skills — a full roster you train with a separate pool of skill points earned each level (gear can boost them too). Several already bite: Driving (drive harder — faster, cheaper trips when you're in a vehicle, up to −40%), Stealth (work quietly — less heat from every crime, harder to be caught pickpocketing, and faster heat cool-down), Killer (+melee power, less police heat to the block), Tough-as-nails (+max HP & defense), Leadership (crew command — cheaper hiring, promotions and daily wages, up to −40%), Dealer (better buy/sell prices), Heavy weapon (+ranged power), Spying (send a crew spy onto enemy turf for live intel — undetectable unless the target out-levels their Spying), and Relation (underworld & wholesaler connections — better buy/sell prices, stacking with Dealer). Two more switch on as their systems land: Security technician and Arsonist.

Secondary stats (shown read-only under Combat & trade on Boss › Stats & skills) are derived — you don't spend points on them directly. They're computed from your primaries, your level, your skills and your gear: max health, melee power, gun power (none without a gun), armour (the defence your worn gear gives), dodge, intimidation, trade edge, and crew costs (what Leadership takes off your crew's fees, promotions and wages). Hover any of them to see what raises it. Ranged attack power comes from the weapon itself — Accuracy governs whether you hit with it.

Level & XP. Crimes, fights, the gym and Sal's contracts earn XP — every crime that comes off teaches you something, more the riskier it is (see What each crime teaches you, under Making money). Each level grants 2 primary points + a few skill points. Levels persist across rounds if you survive. The next level costs your level × 40 XP — so level 2 is 40 XP, level 3 is 80, and the whole climb to the ceiling is 1,800 (tuning — this was 100 a level until 2026-09-02, which put level 10 further away than a whole round).

Level 10 is the ceiling — for you and for every crew member you'll ever hire. That's deliberate: it's what keeps a boss who survived three rounds from being untouchable by someone who started this morning. Once you're there, XP stops mattering and everything else — your crew, your turf, your money, your reputation — is where you keep growing.

Gym. Enter a gym and work out (−8 actions) to earn XP toward your next level — you then raise primary stats by spending level-up points, they aren't ground out at the gym. Each set has a short 30-second cooldown ("catch your breath") before you can train again, so it's a low-risk head start, not something you can spam.

HP & wounds. Max HP is derived from Strength. Lose a fight and you're knocked out and taken to the hospital to heal — see The hospital. You never die to an NPC or the law; only a rival player can finish you.

What you're worth, and which way it's going. Under your stats and skills sits your net worth — everything you own at what it would fetch: your cash of both colours (the bank and the cash on you in full, cash kept anywhere else at half), your goods, every building at its price, your cars and gear at half, less what you owe a loan shark — and beside it your net a day (a city day: two real hours): everything coming in minus everything going out while you're away. A boss with a fat net worth and a day in the red is a boss quietly going broke, which is a thing worth being told in the same breath as the total rather than two screens apart. Two buttons there open Money in & out and Rankings.

Your line. Beside it sits the record of the bosses this account has buried: every character you've played, how each one ended, and how long he lasted. It is public — anybody can pull up your line the way they pull up your net worth. A rival being able to count your dead is reputation earned the hard way, and it's the only place a boss who didn't make it still counts for something.

The city & getting around

Rookport is a zoned port city laid out like a real one — six districts, each with its own character, buildings, and level of police attention:

Between the built-up blocks are parks and pocket forests (with footpaths you can walk), open farmland, a winding river you cross at bridges, and the bay to the south where the docks sit spread along the shore. There are neutral spots too, like a basketball court in the central park. The countryside is drawn as continuous ground rather than a grid of squares — woods, fields and grass run into one another, and the river is one channel with a real shoreline that you can only get across at a bridge deck.

Where the police actually are

The police are people on a shift, walking a beat. Every officer in Rookport is one of the townspeople: he works out of one of the four station houses, twelve hours by day or by night, and has a home, a name and a day of his own. By day 74 officers are out on foot across the whole city — one for every nine blocks — and by night about half that, 37. Each one walks his beat: the handful of blocks around his post (about nine by day, about eighteen at night), a few minutes on each, from the start of his shift to the end of it. The force still leans toward the stations — Downtown, which holds the headquarters and the courthouse in a small area, is the most watched quarter in Rookport, at most one officer for every three blocks; the Row and Ironside come next; the Greenbelt and Little Sicily see only a few. A cop sees only the block he is on, and only his side of the door: a crime one street away, or behind a wall from him, is a crime he never saw.

Ten patrol cars cover the city round the clock — three out of Downtown, three out of the Row, two out of Ironside and two out of the Docks — each with two named officers in it, patrolling around their station and answering calls. Hover a police car for its number, its station and who's in it. An empty car is parked at its station and does nothing until its next crew walk out to it and get in. A police car is one of the fastest cars in the city: it patrols, answers a call and chases at 90 km/h, as fast as the quickest saloon you can buy — only a couple of the city's cars can outrun one (a petty call is still answered at an unhurried pace). There are no SWAT men standing on the streets any more: the headquarters' SWAT men ride two SWAT vans parked outside it, four men in each, all shift. A van only comes out for a raid on a boss who's Hunted, or after a cop killer who finishes another officer while they hunt him (see Heat & the police) — and when it's coming for you, it's on your map wherever it is.

"Police nearby" is where they really are. The map's police overlay (Police nearby — where officers and cars are now), the stops on the road, the avoid-police route and the extra cost of a trip into a watched block all read how near the officers on duty and the patrol cars are right now — not a fixed number for the block. A station's own block with nobody on duty near it reads 0; an officer walking onto your corner lights it up. So look before you act, and remember that a beat moves: the quiet block you picked can have an officer on it in five minutes.

Off duty, an officer is just a man in a blue shirt. Between his shifts he goes home, shops and sleeps like anybody. His row on the block says Patrolman · off duty, and his card's Duty: line says where he is: on duty, walking his beat, on duty, at the station, on duty, in car 3 — or off duty. Off duty he isn't the law: he arrests nobody, stops nobody and doesn't step in — though, like any passer-by, he is still a witness to a murder or a hold-up he sees, and going after him is still a crime against the police: whoever sees it calls it in, finished or not.

Crime draws them. A crime marks its block as stirred up for a while (it cools off by itself over the next day). One small crime nobody phoned in (a lifted wallet, a mugging, a fight) stirs it only a little and moves nobody; a crime that is called in (a murder, a hold-up, an attack on an officer, an alarm going off) stirs it enough to pull them, and so do small crimes piling up on one block. Then officers on that beat drift toward it, the patrol cars swing past it more often, and every quarter of an hour a few officers are moved onto the blocks next to the worst of it — and back again as it cools. So a quiet corner stays quiet only until you make it interesting.

A killed officer is replaced the next morning. His beat or his seat in the car stays empty until 5 in the morning, when the station hires the fittest man looking for work and gives him the city's pistol and vest (which can't be taken off him).

The city is laid out like a real one. The lone courthouse sits in the heart of downtown with the big banks beside it; a police station covers each rough quarter of the city (Little Sicily has none — the law mostly leaves the home turf alone); there are two hospitals (the downtown one and Little Sicily's own neighbourhood hospital) and a single remote prison on the northern edge. Venues spread out the way they would in life — a gym a few steps from where newcomers start, corner stores rationed around every district, dive bars in the working districts, the only casinos on the Row, dealerships and gun shops where their trade belongs, and the crack houses tucked away from the main streets. No two of a speciality sit on adjacent corners.

Tiles have a front and a back. On a tile you're either outside on the block or inside the building. Some actions only work in one context (e.g. gym training needs you inside; the people you can reach depend on whether you're in or out). Toggle with Enter / Exit, and set auto-enter to walk straight in on arrival. What's done inside is offered inside: the counter and the shelf, the burner, applying for the job (from the street there's a sign in the window), training at the gym, the line-up at the bar, a shakedown, a robbery, planting a device, the safe, the stash and the ward all appear once you've walked in. Both are a real walk at your own pace: going in, you walk to the door and you're outside until you reach it. Going out, you cross the building to the door and you're still inside until you step through it — a few seconds from the front room, longer from the back.

A building has a layout inside. Every building has the same simple plan for now. The door opens into a front room with the counter and till and the shelves, and a passage leads to the back room, where the safe, the gun rack and the stash (your home locker, at home) are kept. Only a place that serves the public has a counter. A house has no counter and no till: its loose cash is in a cash tin, and a bunker, a holding installation or an illegal workshop keeps a cash box. Nothing in a house is on show, either: in your own flat you see your locker, and the house's tin, shelves and safe are for its owner and his family to see, or for a burglar who has broken in. Walking between them takes time, and the building card tells you where you're standing ("at the counter, by the till"). Step inside and the map draws them (see You see a room by being in it).

Storming a defended door takes five seconds. Every other door is instant. You walk into a shop, a shut venue, a stranger's building or your own place with no delay at all. But if somebody has guards posted inside — a rival holding the place — coming through costs you five seconds standing in the doorway, and for those five seconds you cannot shoot back. The guards get a free shot at you as you come through — one volley, and it doesn't miss. Your bodyguards take it before you do, which is exactly why you bring them. Take it standing and you're in; go down in the doorway and you're dumped back on the street, hurt, with nothing to show for it. Step away, travel, or get hurt and you lose the door and have to start again. You can't shoot through a wall either — gun range is your tile and your side of the door, so going inside genuinely breaks contact with the street.

Unless somebody's dug in. A rival who holds the building — he owns it, his family owns it, or he has guards posted on it — is a garrison, and a garrison shoots out of its windows. You can trade fire with him from the street and he can hit you back, but he's behind brick and you're standing in the road: he defends better while the wall is between you (the selector marks him 🧱 dug in). Ducking into a shop doesn't do this for you — only a place you actually hold. And it's usually still better to rush the door and pay the five seconds than to stand in the street shooting at a window.

How far and how fast. A block in Rookport is 60 metres, so the city is about 1.8 km across — a dense downtown of short blocks. You walk at your own pace — 9 km/h with no Speed at all, up to 12 — and you walk the real pavement, round the buildings rather than through them, so a block on foot is about half a minute. Cars run from about 25 km/h for a tier-1 farm flatbed to 105 km/h for the Rookport Phantom, and your Driving skill is worth between −15% and +20% of that on top. So the worst car in the game is still three times a walking pace and the best is ten, which is what a car is for. Every trip estimate is measured on the actual route you'll take at those speeds: the walk to your car, the streets, the parking, the last few steps.

The trip line prices both ways. Pick a block and you're shown the walk and the drive side by side — actions, minutes and the actual km/h for each — with the one you're currently on marked. If your ride is parked somewhere else it still quotes the drive, and tells you the car isn't with you.

Travel follows the streets. On foot you walk in a straight line wherever nothing's in the way — along the street to the next block, across a street, through a park — and round the buildings, along the pavements, only where one is in your way. By car, you first walk to where it's parked and get in. You drive the lanes, keeping right and turning at the corners, then slide sideways into the free parking space nearest where you're going — on any of the block's four kerbs (and if they're all taken, you're asked what to do: see Parking, traffic and the tow truck below). Chose no particular spot? You get out and stand beside the car. Chose one (see Right-click to move below)? You park and walk the last few metres to it. The trip takes real time and actions to complete, and you are really out on the streets while it runs: you can be seen, and stopped, wherever you actually are. The moment your countdown lands you're on the block and ready to act — the game pulls your arrival instantly and opens the block you reached in the left panel, no waiting, no extra click. There is no "loading" step on arrival: the block you land on, and the eight around it, are fetched in the same moment the game learns you've arrived, so the panel is already filled in when it opens. The trip countdown runs on the city's clock, not your computer's, so it's right even if your computer's clock is a little off. Crossing policed tiles can trigger road encounters (see Heat). If you're carrying heat, pushing into a well-policed destination costs extra actions — and the trip estimate shows the true price up front.

Nobody teleports — everybody is somewhere. Every person in Rookport — you, your crew, a rival and his men, the townspeople, the police, SWAT, the paramedics, the drivers — is always at a real spot on the map, and gets anywhere only by walking or driving there. Nobody appears beside you and nobody vanishes off a block: help comes from where it is, by the quickest way it has, and you can watch it come — your men on their way are dots on the map, a car full of them is one car. A new face in town comes in along a road at the edge of the map or off a boat at the docks; a man who leaves walks off. If the server ever crashes, the people in the street start again from home or work (an update keeps everyone where they are). (You, your crew and a prisoner on his way to the cell carry on from where you were, and parked cars stay parked.)

Avoid police (a travel toggle). On the block's card in the viewer on the right, under Drive there / Walk there, there's an Avoid police box (beside it, Go inside on arrival: ticked, you walk in when you get there — a door you can't get through still stops you outside; unticked, you stop on the street). Tick it and your trip routes around the police: a detour through the quieter streets that costs about 40% more actions and takes however much longer the detour is (the estimate shows you). In exchange you skip the wanted-heat surcharge and you won't be pulled over by a road patrol on the way (a Cold driver, under 25, is never pulled over anyway, so the box matters from Noticed up) — the safe way to move a hot boss or a load of contraband across town. Leave it off when you're in a hurry: you take the direct path but risk crossing a patrol. The trip estimate updates the moment you tick the box, so you can see the cost of going quiet. Each trip row shows its price in actions, what you'll have left after it, any extra your heat adds, and how long it takes; a trip you can't afford stays on the card, greyed, saying how many actions it needs and how many you have.

The city is a 30×33 grid of six zoned districts. Not every tile is built up: there's farmland, parks and forest (with footpaths you walk), a winding river, and the bay to the south. Water — the river and the bay — is open water you can't cross, so you use the bridges; the docks sit spread along the shore. The map is a big, zoomable, pannable board (scroll-wheel to zoom, click-hold-drag to pan, ⌖ Follow me to lock the camera onto your character) that keeps you centred as you move — and it's drawn on a single baked layer, so panning and zooming stay smooth. Hover anything for a tooltip — every button and meter explains itself; each tile is drawn in Rookport's house style — its own hand-painted building sprite sitting on the street and grounds, with rivers, parks, fields, forests, bridges and roads painted in too.

You always know where you are. The block you're standing on carries a pulsing gold ring, at every zoom level — one glance finds you anywhere in the city. You yourself are the gold circle at your exact spot on it (half the size inside a building, where you're drawn in the room itself and the ring is left off), and when you're sitting in your car — or in the back of a police car — you are the car.

Changed your mind? Stop. While you're on your way, right-click anywhere on the map and you stop right where you are — or press Stop on the trip card, in the bar at the bottom beside the log (its Stop also sits beside the trip's tab there). While you travel, the trip card shows where you're going, the time left with a bar for how far along you are, how you're travelling (on foot, walking to your car, driving), the actions the trip cost, whether you took the back streets, and what happens when you get there. That right-click only stops you; your next right-click sends you wherever you want, from where you're standing. The actions for the trip you stopped stay spent — you paid them to set off. You stop exactly where you see yourself on the map:

Stopping doesn't shake the police. If they're after you, they come to where you stopped — see Heat & the police.

Right-click to move. Right-click a spot on your own block and your boss walks there, round the building rather than through it. Inside a building, right-click a room to walk to it; to leave, you go out through the door. Right-click another block and you set off for it, at the same cost and under the same rules as Travel, ending on the exact spot you clicked. A spot on a building means its front door, from the outside; by car, you park at that block's kerb and walk the rest. On your own block, right-click a spot inside the building from the street and your boss walks in by the door and on to it. That only works through a door he can simply walk through: a locked door or a guarded one stops him, and he tells you why. Water and walls are refused.

You have to be close enough to touch it. Everything you can take or hit has a place:

You can only act on something within a few metres of where you stand, or about a dozen for a car going past on the street. Too far away? Your boss walks over first, at his own pace, and then does it — and the world doesn't wait while he walks. The log says what he's walking to, about how far and how many seconds, and that it goes through when he gets there. The same goes for the door. Press something that needs you inside — Work here, Train, the ward, a shakedown, taking something off a shelf — while you're out on the pavement, and he goes in and does it. Press something that needs you outside — lifting a car, the lookout — while you're indoors, and he walks out and does it. He never breaks a locked door or storms a guarded one to get somewhere: those are the Break in and Enter building buttons, and he stops and tells you so. If the person you want is walking somewhere on the block, you're sent to where they're going, not to where they were. If they're crossing the block on foot, you're sent to a point on their way that you reach before they do, and they walk into you there (or you're told they'll pass right by where you stand, and to give them a moment); only someone who will be off the block before you could get there is out of reach, and the line says so: wait at the corner they're heading for. Their card says it before you press: Pickpocket and Rob are greyed with that reason while you stand on the block, and come back as soon as they stop or their way comes past you. A greyed Pickpocket or Rob (crossing the block, in a fight, short of actions) shows only its reason, never odds. A car or a truck driving past can't be walked after: it lights up while it's passing close enough, and that's your moment. (Your face isn't on the map: at map scale a portrait is a few pixels of smudge, so it lives big and legible in the top bar instead, where you can actually see it.)

Moving the map: the wheel zooms, dragging pans. Scroll anywhere over the board to zoom in and out. The zoom is anchored on the block you have selected — it stays exactly where it is on screen and the city grows around it, so you never have to chase it with a drag. Nothing selected? It anchors on the block you're standing on. Picked a block that's currently off screen? Zooming brings it back into view. Click and drag to pan. (There are no +/− buttons; the wheel is the zoom.)

⌖ Follow me is a lock, not a jump. Press it and the camera locks onto your character and keeps them centred as they move — through a whole trip across the city, without you touching anything. The button says Following while it's on. Dragging the map yourself is the only thing that releases it — nothing else does, not travelling, not arriving. Press it again to re-lock. The setting is remembered.

People on the map are colour-coded dots — one dot per side, with the head count on it. The map shows you where everyone is and whose side they're on, and nothing more (portraits and actions live in the side panels — see The screen below). Everyone standing on the same block on the same side stacks into one dot carrying their number: twelve police on a corner are a single blue disc reading 12, not twelve marks piled on top of each other. Two different families never share a dot, so a block with cops, your crew and a rival's guards shows three. A lone person shows no number. Hover any dot to see who it is.

The colours: yellow = locals and shopkeepers · blue = police (they flash blue/red when they're coming for you) · black with a white ring = SWAT (none stand on the streets now — they ride the dark SWAT vans, beacons flashing when one is out) · bright red = a rival boss and his people · dark red = street muscle that attacks on sight · green = your own people (garrisoned crew, your lookouts) · orange = lookouts and other special functions.

🚨 Anyone inside a building is off the map. A dot means someone on the pavement. People indoors don't show on the board at all, and they don't show in the left panel either until you walk in yourself — and from across the street you can't even see how many are in there. If you want to know what's happening inside a building you don't stand in, that's what a planted bug or a spy buys you (see Eyes on the city).

Each side on a block gets one small dot, standing at that side's own spot on the pavement around the building and carrying how many of them are there. Someone walking somewhere is drawn as his own dot, moving along his way; he joins his side's dot when he stops. A lone man is a tiny pip; a dozen police are a bigger disc marked 12 — the mark grows with the crowd, so you can read a block at a glance without reading the number. The dots are faintly see-through so they sit over the city rather than covering it, and go solid when you point at one. They keep their spots while people are standing there; nobody shuffles between refreshes.

A side is a side, not a man. Bosses who belong to no family share one mark between them, the same way the locals or the police do — twenty unaffiliated bosses on a corner are one disc reading 20, not twenty discs. Two families never share a mark, and neither does anyone else's crew.

Zoom out far enough and a block's sides merge into one circle with the block's total on it. Once a block is only a few pixels across, four separate marks on it are a smudge rather than four facts — so past that point the map tells you how many people are here and leaves whose to the panel. Zoom back in and the sides come apart again. A block that only ever held one side keeps its colour the whole way out, because there was never anything to confuse it with. Clicking the merged circle selects the block and lists everybody on it, exactly as the separate dots do. The number is printed on the mark whenever the mark is big enough to hold it; below that its size still tells you, and hovering always names the count.

Click a dot and the group opens on the left — the block is selected and that side's list springs open for you to pick from. If the dot stands for one person, it goes straight to him: his row lights up and everything you can do to him appears on the right. Doing it on a block across the street works too: you'll see exactly who is standing there, and every action reads "you're watching from another block — travel there to act" until you actually go.

The list is a tree — everything on a block belongs to somebody. A boss who brought hirelings, or who left a car at the kerb, gets a ▸ beside his name; open it and his people and his motor are right underneath him, instead of scattered through three separate folds. That works for anyone: the passer-by who owns the car outside his own front door has it filed under him. (A car whose owner is indoors stays out on its own — it's still at the kerb whether or not you can see him.)

Every car stands in its own parking space, and clicking one opens the cars in the panel under the people who own them — where each one gives you its model, quality, worth, whether the owner is stood beside it watching, and your exact odds of a clean lift. On your own block that card carries the Take button; from across the street it tells you everything and says to travel there first.

The city has streets, and everything drives on them. A road runs along every block's edge, so the map reads as a street grid with the buildings set back behind their kerbs — and where there's no road there's no tarmac, so open fields, parkland and water stay unbroken. Out in the country, dirt tracks link every farm to the town, so there's no farmstead a car can't reach. Cars roll those roads as rectangles pointed the way they're driving (a truck draws longer and wider), keeping right — eastbound traffic on one side of a street, westbound on the other. NPCs stroll at a realistic walking pace — about the same speed you walk at 1×, quicker or slower with their own Speed — out of their doors, round the block, to their cars and across town. Everything on the board is live, and smooth: every car and every walker is drawn exactly where it really is, moment to moment, whether or not you do anything. A car doesn't crawl and then jump to where it's going, and it holds its line on a straight. Police cars, delivery trucks and ambulances only show where you can actually see them — except a cruiser that's coming for you.

🚨 Nothing on the map is scenery. Every car you can see is a real thing with a real reason to be there: a police unit on patrol, an ambulance fetching somebody, a delivery truck running goods from a factory to a shop — or a resident driving somewhere. A moving car has a person in it, on their way to work, home, or out on an errand, in a car they actually own.

So a car that's out driving is not parked at its owner's kerb. One car, one place. A ride you were waiting to lift may simply have gone out — and come back later.

Click a passing car and you get the man at the wheel: who he is, what he's driving, how good it is, what it's worth, and where he's headed. If it's passing right by you (it lights up) you can stop it and take it — the same odds as lifting one off the kerb, except he's sitting in it, so he sees every bit of it and the odds are the worst version of a street boost. Cruisers open too, and so do trucks and ambulances.

Parked cars sit at the kerb, each in its own space. Every block has eight parking spaces — two on each of its four kerbs — and each space holds one car, whoever it belongs to: yours, a rival's, a resident's, a police cruiser's. A car parks facing the way it drove in, and a car that has to go back the other way turns round right where it is — it no longer drives to the end of the street to come back. A resident's car stays wherever he last parked it. Every car on the map can be clicked — on your own block it opens in the viewer with everything you can do to it, and anywhere else it selects that block and opens its Cars list on the left, so you can size up a car from across the street and then decide whether to walk over.

A car at the kerb has a card of its own. It says whose it is (a local who lives on the block), what it is (its tier, what it's worth, its speed, what it carries, its boot and its seats) and whether its owner is standing by it. Under that sits one move, Carjack it, with its price in actions and your odds as a number and a word — and on your own block, the whole split drawn as a bar: how often you drive off clean, how often the lock beats you (the actions are spent and your heat goes up a little; no police), and how often the car's alarm goes off and the police are called. The card explains the number from your Mechanic against the car's tier, says what you end up with if it works (you drive off in it; your own car stays where you left it, and the stolen car is hot: only a garage buys it, at the fence price), and lists the other cars at the same kerb. On a block you're only watching you see the clean chance, and the button waits until you're there. A boss's parked car, your own ride, a body on the pavement, a lookout (a rival's, one for hire, or your own) and a man drinking at a recruiting bar each open a card of the same shape: whose it is, what you know, what it is to you, then the moves grouped by what they risk. Nothing hostile is ever drawn against your own side — your car, the family's car, a family body, the family's lookout or yours have no move against them at all.

The screen

The game is three panels around the map, plus a thin menu on top of it and a bar along the bottom:

On a computer: the top bar, the map and the middle column

On a computer (a window 1200 px wide or more, in two or three columns) the frame is built to leave the map as much room as it can, with nothing of it hidden.

The right panel

On a computer (two or three columns) the right panel is built so that what you can do is never lost in a wall of text, whatever is going on.

There is no bank app: cash comes out in person, at a bank. ‹ Back goes to the screen before, the bar in the middle goes Home, and Put away (it names the card it goes back to), Esc or the Phone again bring back the thing you had picked. A click on the map puts the phone away — except when an app asked you to pick a block (Spy…, Ops' Where): then the click fills it and the phone stays. The top bar's 📞 and Contacts › Phone open this same handset on a computer (on a phone-sized screen the phone keeps its own screen in the middle).

Every action tells you its price before you take it. Whatever you're looking at, an action reads the same way: the cost in actions as a chip, then who could phone the police if it's a crime, then the button. If you can't do it, the button greys out and the reason is printed on the line — "you need to be inside", "you don't have $400", "the shop is shut" — instead of hiding in a tooltip you have to hunt for. Nothing in Rookport should make you press a button to find out what it costs.

The right panel keeps up with you. After everything you do — and the moment a fight you're in is over — the panel redraws from the city as it now stands, without you clicking anything: a racket you've just won reads "you run protection here · Drop it", a building you've just bought shows your owner's rows, a lookout you've taken out is gone, a lookout you've hired becomes your lookout, a body you've emptied says there's nothing left on him. The game's answer to what you did stays at the top of the panel through that redraw, and whatever it set off elsewhere — a job ticked in your contract book — is said straight after it (the log below keeps both). What can never apply isn't offered at all: you don't break into, rob, bug or shake down a place you own or one you run protection on; you don't buy from or sell to your own counter, fence desk, gear shelf, car lot or phone stock (take what you want off your own shelf with 🎒 Move things); you don't plant a bug in the house you live in; your own staff aren't marks; a truck carrying stock to your own shop is your stock arriving, not a score; the boss of one of the four rival gangs can be fought, but not befriended, tracked, messaged or traded with; and a ruin sells, hires, trains and pays protection to nobody until it's rebuilt. Your family and the place you work are never offered as a target at all — see Whose side it's on. What's only blocked for the moment stays on the panel, greyed, with the reason printed — not enough actions or cash, no phone, fully staffed, the owner standing beside his car — and when you're down, jailed or held, one line at the top of the card says so and every button under it waits. In a fight, anything violent (and walking off) says you're in a fight — see it through or flee first, and comes back by itself when the fight is over.

Identity blocks carry the facts. Above the actions, whatever you've selected states itself in a row of small chips: a block shows its heat, what's in the till, how its locks are set, its defense, and whether you're looking at it live or from memory. A person shows their level, condition and tags. You read the situation off the top of the panel and act at the bottom of it.

You see a room by being in it. There is no "look inside" button, and you can't read a shop's shelves from the pavement. Step inside and the map zooms all the way in and takes the roof off — the moment your boss is through the door, never while he's still walking up to it. While you're in there the street round you is out of sight: the cars parked at your kerb, the traffic and the people on your block and the blocks next to it aren't drawn over the room — only the blocks your cameras, informants or posted men watch, and anyone fighting you or coming for you (a police car on its way for you, the officers walking to your door, a SWAT van), who stay on the map wherever they are. You see the front room with its counter and the back room behind it, both named, and the front door at the bottom. The things you can open stand where they really are: the till by the counter, the shelves, the safe, the gun rack and the stash in the back, your locker when it's your home. Each is drawn as the thing itself with its name under it and, under that, what's in it ("$500", "18 items", "empty") or why it isn't yours to take ("not yours", or "locked" on a shut safe or gun rack, each with a small padlock); hover it for the whole story. The people in there stand where they really are too — round dots in their side's colour, your family as green squares — and so do you, with YOU beside your dot and the bodyguards who walked in with you in a row just behind it (the key lists them by name; clicking one opens Your men), all drawn small enough that the room still reads as a room (clicking a man still works a little way off his dot, and opens him and his card). At the top-left of the map a line says where you are ("Inside the bar", "Inside your home") over a key: you, who else is in here and how many, and "Click a thing to see it"; on a big board the room stands just to the right of it, and on a short one (a laptop, a phone) the line and the key fold into one row along the top. Click a thing to open it. In a shop that isn't yours, clicking the shelves or the till opens what's for sale on the card on the right (Gear for sale here, Shop counter, At the counter), where you buy; taking it off the shelf is robbing the place, under Violent. Step back out and your usual zoom comes back. The block card's 🚪 Inside building section lists the same things with what's in each. Every actual move goes through one panel — 🎒 Move things opens it — with what's in the room on one side and where you're putting it on the other: your pockets, the boot of your car when it's on the block, your home locker when you're at home. You can always look at what you can reach; what you can take depends on whose it is and whether you're actually robbing the place, and a shelf you can't reach tells you why.

Do it yourself and you only pay for parts. A locksmith's bill is his labour and his hardware. If your own Locksmith — or a crew member's — reaches the level you're fitting, you do the job and pay a tenth: the hardware, nothing else. The panel says so and quotes what the locksmith would have wanted. Same for your car: away from a garage, a good enough Mechanic puts it right for parts plus actions instead of the full bill. And the hands that did the work earn XP for it — including your crew's, so a mechanic you hired for a boost is worth keeping around for the repairs.

Inside and outside are two different scenes. The block card says which one you're standing in and what each holds: out on the street it's the kerb, the cars and the people on the pavement; inside it's the till, the stock, the safe, whoever's minding the place, and your job if you work there. A verb you can't see is usually over the threshold, not missing.

Everything is in somebody's inventory. There are no imaginary objects in Rookport. The pistols in a gun shop are real pieces on a real shelf — the card tells you how many are left, buying one takes it away, and robbing the place takes the same one. Clear a shop out and it's genuinely sold out until it restocks. The same is true of a hideout armory: it's a container like any other, and a burglar who has cracked the safe — the hardest lock on the building, and the one no crowbar opens — gets the guns in it. Someone who hasn't can see there's a rack and can't reach it.

And a dealership forecourt has cars on it. Eight of them, real, listed with how many of each. You can buy one — or you can drive one off the lot. That's harder than lifting a car from a kerb, and for reasons you can see: a showroom is watched, the stock is mint, and the good models sit a tier above what the street leaves lying about. A botched attempt sets the alarm off and calls the law at once, and it raises serious heat either way. What you get for the risk is the pick of the lot, in perfect condition, for nothing.

The showroom car is another matter. It stands inside, behind the glass, never on the forecourt — so you can't drive it off the lot. The only way to steal it is a break-in after hours: a dealer locks up like a casino (Locksmith 7 for the door — or smash it, and the law is called on the first swing), you need Mechanic at the car's quality to start it without its keys, and the alarm calls the police the moment it moves, whether you get it out or not. Get it through the doors and it's yours, with you at the wheel in the street outside — and every patrol in the district on its way. (While you're inside, the break-in card shows the car, your odds and the Drive it out button. From the street, the dealer's card has an In the showroom row: the car, its tier and price, when it goes back to the maker if nobody buys it — or, with the window empty, when the next one is due — and Buy for anyone but the dealer himself. It has no Boost: it was never on the forecourt.)

Money goes where you put it. Dirty cash is loot like anything else, and it can be put down: in the boot of your car, your home locker, or a hideout stash — in whatever amount you type, not just all of it. That matters because a street death only strips what you're carrying. Everything you've put away survives it.

So the dirty figure in the top bar is your total, with the carried part called out beside it — that's the number worth being nervous about. The Inventory tab lists every place you have money, how much is in each, and which of it is on your body. What you can't do is post money into somebody else's till or safe.

The building sheet. Standing on any block, the building card shows what the place actually is: its structure, its defense, the Locksmith level of its front door and its safe, its security rating, and what it draws a day as one figure — Draws up to $71 a day ($25 base × prosperity 2.84) — a city day's, a twelfth of a real day's. "Up to", because fire damage, short shelves and a district whose people are short of money all mean less comes in. On an unowned block it also tells you how long the asking price takes to pay itself back — at today's prosperity, and at the base rate beside it. Read it before you buy, and read it again after you upgrade — because an upgrade moves specific numbers and you should be able to watch them move. Fortifying raises Defense and the front door, not the structure figure, which is why a fortified place can still read 108/108.

Heat says what it does to you. The meter in the top bar is a band, not just a number: Cold (nobody's looking: the police pass you like anyone else, on foot and on the road — no patrol pulls your car over while you are Cold, so keeping your heat under 25 is how you keep the police off you), Noticed (from 25: the police who see you stop you and search you, at most once an hour, and travelling through policed blocks costs extra), Wanted (from 50: the police who see you arrest you on sight, even doing nothing), Hunted (at 70+ the law comes to you on its own — up to about three raids a day at 100, whether you're playing or not; they seize illegal goods and the cash on you, never legal goods; from 85, half the raids also jail you: SWAT takes you in by force and hurt, takes every weapon you carry, and the jail's medical ward patches you up inside — and the police who see you arrest you on sight, as when you're Wanted). Hover it to see how long your current heat takes to cool — it clears by itself, faster with Stealth, and twice as fast while you lie low inside your own hideout.

The clock, top right. The time in Rookport on the city's clock, day or night, and how long until it turns, in real minutes (night in 41 min). Read it — the hour decides more than anything else in this game: whether a shop is open to walk into or shut and worth breaking into, whether your job is paying you right now, whether there's anyone in a place to intimidate, and whether the court is sitting (a friend can only post your bail at the courthouse by day — the jail itself never locks you in at night).

Rookport keeps its own clock. It runs 12 times real time: day (6am to 6pm) is one real hour, night the next — 12 city days in a real day. A city hour is 5 real minutes and a city minute 5 real seconds, so the clock in the top bar ticks while you watch. Every price "a day" is a city day: the starter room is $4.58 a day (two real hours), which comes to $55 over a real day, as before — a job, a crew man's wage, a bay, a business's takings, the books' wash, the dues: each "a day" is a twelfth of what a real day pays or costs, and a real day of them adds up to the same money as ever. Lengths of time stay real: a sentence, heat cooling, healing, a loan's term, the pound's fourteen days, the lot's three, being let go after three days away, the respawn window and the round itself are real days and hours, and the screens say "real" where it matters. Every countdown you act on — a shop opening, your shift, the court — is in real minutes ("opens in 4 min"). The family's cash and stores limits count a real (UTC) day, and so does the lawyer's one case a day.

Cars on the map. The cars parked on a block belong to the people who live on it — so most blocks have none, plenty have one, and a busy corner in a rich quarter might have two. That's the point: when a car icon appears, it means something. The map marks the best one on each block — gold if your Mechanic is good enough to lift it cleanly, grey if it's out of your depth. Hover it for the model, its quality, your odds, who owns it, and whether he's stood beside it watching.

Empire › What you own. One screen for everything that is yours. Your money sits on top: what's in the bank (clean, safe even if you're killed), all your dirty cash wherever it sits, and the part of it on you (the only money a robbery or a street death can take), with a fold-out list of where each dollar is. Under it, one card per thing you own: where you live (rent a day, how far behind you are and when the landlord throws you out, your locker, and the button to move up a floor with the deposit and the new rent on it), your ride (its tier, its real speed, what a block costs you in actions, seats, cover, condition, the boot with Load and Take buttons), your cars (every other car you own, each with where it is — see Your cars), your job (the shift, the wage, or "no wage at your own place", and the switch that sends him to work while you're away), the other places that are yours without a deed (a shop paying you a cut, a lookout), your hideout with its whole upgrade tree, your buildings worst first (Exposed, Thin or Held, and why, with Full sheet and Send crew), and what you could lose today. Everything on it says where it is: each card shows its block and district and carries Map (jump the board to it) and, when you're not already standing there, Travel with the trip's price in actions (a "You're here" tag instead when you are). That goes for every car you own too: each one stands somewhere real, and its row says where. An empty card says what it's for and how to fill it, with the button that takes you there (Find housing, Find a car dealership, Find a building to buy). A greyed button prints why underneath: not enough money, not enough actions for the trip, already on the move, or in jail or hospital.

Your view moves with you. The fog of war follows you as you travel, not just when you arrive — blocks open up ahead as you drive past them and close behind you, so you can see what you're heading into while you're still on the road.

You can see what you are on the map. While you're travelling, the marker moving down the street is a gold pip when you're on foot, and a car pointing the way you're going when you're driving — so a glance at the map tells you which kind of trip this is, and which way you're headed. Cars left standing on a block show on the map too: a small car at the kerb, green if it's yours and red if it isn't. A red one is a car you could try to boost. Yours is always visible, even through fog of war — you don't forget where you parked — while somebody else's only shows on blocks you can actually see.

Each group says in one plain line what it means, and each action keeps a small caption naming the part of the place it belongs to (🔑 Ownership, 🚪 Inside building…). Where one part offers three or more things — a shop counter's whole price list, your garage, the locks — they fold into their own little heading inside the group, closed, with a count, so the group never turns into a wall of buttons; what's in the room and what's about whose place it is always stay open. A group with nothing in it isn't drawn: on your own place, your family's ground or where you work there is no Crime or Violent heading at all. What can never apply to you here isn't shown; what's only blocked for now is shown greyed, with the reason under it. At the bottom, About this place holds what you can only read: 🔎 Inspect building — what you can see of the place from where you are: from the street, the sign, the damage to its structure and the front door; inside (or with eyes in there), the safe, the defense and what it earns too — and whatever is left about whose place it is, what's in the room, the locks, the land, the books. It starts open, so the facts are never behind two closed folds — and whatever is left down there of the court, the bank or the loan shark's desk is open too, because that's why you walked in. (With only one or two of these sections there's no "About this place" heading — they simply stand at the bottom.) A closed section carries a badge saying how many things you can do inside it and how many are shut to you. Whatever you fold or unfold is remembered, per section, across visits and reloads. Open ground reads the same way: Lie low is Honest, the corner Deal is a Crime, and what the ground is — who's out there and who'd call it in — sits underneath.

You're not alone out there. In a round that has them, four AI-run families work the same city with the same tools you have — the Marconi Family downtown, the Falcone Family on the Ironside bank, the Serrano Family east on the Row, and the Castellano Family down at the docks, each run by its Don: Vittorio of the Marconis, Amedeo of the Falcones, Calogero of the Serranos and Ruggero of the Castellanos. You make five. Each flies its own colour on the map, so a turf badge tells you at a glance whose block you're standing on. They claim and expand their turf over time, so blocks you were eyeing may already belong to somebody. Watch the Rankings panel to see who's holding how much of Rookport. And they don't just hold turf — they run it: a family collects the takings from its buildings, staffs its bars and shops with real employees (someone's behind the counter of a family joint — with all that implies), converts captured buildings into stills and drug labs you can rob, and hits back when raided — a family you've been hitting hires extra muscle and garrisons the block you struck. (Still deepening: dealers selling their product, armed-up soldiers, revenge raids.) A new round has no AI families: from the round after the one that ends on 25 October, your rivals are the other players, the street and the Harbor Syndicate, who hold every dock nobody owns. The City gangs drawer under Rankings says which kind of round you're in.

Breaking in

There is one way to take a building, and it is always the same one: get inside, lift things one at a time, and get out before the law arrives. There's no button that turns a shop into money — you do it with your hands, against a clock, carrying only what fits.

What changes is when you do it, because a building is locked when nobody's inside it. A grocer keeps day hours, so his shop is wide open at noon and a locked door at three in the morning. A barman keeps night hours, so the bar is the other way round. The man behind the counter goes home at closing: a shut shop has nobody in it to rob, to pick, to lean on or to phone the police — and nobody to walk in past. A hotel never shuts: it has a day manager and a night manager. A house is locked whenever nobody's home — and its own people keep it locked when they are: the townspeople who live there are out at work by day and asleep inside at night, so a house is a quiet job while they're out, and a home invasion at night — you break in on them, and they're witnesses. It's open only when somebody else is inside: the boss who lives there, a guest, a guard. (Its rent roll is money, not people.) You never pick a mode; you pick an hour, and the city answers by changing what the same job costs you:

A place that's open for business has an open door. You walk into a shop at noon, a bar at midnight, the way anyone does — no lock, no Locksmith, no crime committed by stepping through it. A door is only locked when the place is shut and nobody's inside, and that's the moment it becomes a job.

Shut and emptyOpen, with people in it
Getting inpick the lock, or force itjust walk in — no lock, no Locksmith, no crime
Where it startsat the door — opening it is the burglaryinside, when you press 💰 Rob this place
Who sees younobodyeveryone in the room, at once
Your clockabout a minute before the alarm — longer with Stealththe witnesses': everyone in the room calls the police a minute or two after you start (after the fight, if there is one), unless you stop him
Resistancenoneanyone who can fight, does — the owner, his guards, armed staff, any police on the block

You rob an open place from inside it. Walk in like a customer — that costs nothing and is nobody's business — and then, standing in the room, decide. 💰 Rob it sits under Violent · can start a fight (captioned Inside building), and the line under it says what it will cost you in plain words. Who would call the police: "Rosa, behind the counter, would call the police", "a customer would call the police", or "nobody here would call the police". Who else is inside: "2 others inside", with their names when you hover, or "nobody else inside". You are never counted as a witness to your own robbery. In a house the line says you're in somebody's home; nobody is a customer there. The staring contest happens when you press it: if you plainly out-gun everyone in there they stand aside, and if you don't, it's a fight. There is no button on the pavement that robs a shop, and there never will be again. The loot window opens by itself the moment you're in, beside the building rather than on top of it — and never over the bar at the bottom (where the wanted banner and a raid alert sit) or, on a big screen, the right panel, even if you once dragged it there; on a phone, tap Search the room, next to Get out with the haul, and it opens below that button.

That's not a formality. The people you're intimidating are the people in the room with you — so being in there is what makes the gauge on that button mean anything.

So a daylight job is still on the table, and it's still the loud, reckless, profitable option it always was. It's loud because there are people watching you do it — not because it's a different crime.

Holding up a person is a different thing entirely, and it still works on nerve — see Three ways to take from a person below. That's an action on them, wherever they're standing.

Locksmith is the skill, and your level is the highest lock you can pick — so it decides which of the city's shut buildings you can enter at all. A shed or a row house needs 1. A corner store 2. A bar or a lock-up 3. A hotel or a warehouse 4. A gun shop or the docks 5. A casino 6. A bank 7. Owning a place adds 2 more, and every tier of hideout fortification adds another. Bring a crew member who knows locks and they'll add +1 to what you can open. That's what a place has on it when nobody's paid to change it — and any owner can (see Locks you buy, below), so another boss's front door is worth exactly what he's spent on it.

How a job goes:

  1. Break in — 6 actions. This is the one crime in the game that calls nobody: no patrol is sent, you just get a little warmer.
  2. Take what's there, one thing at a time, 1 action each. Each thing is where it's kept: the till at the counter, the shelves in the front room, the safe and the stash in the back. Walking to each takes a few seconds, and the alarm clock keeps running while you do. Cash goes straight in your pocket as dirty money. Goods take carry space, so bring a car if you want the shelves. Gear goes to your stash.
  3. Crack the safe, if the place has one. It holds the good stuff, and on a place nobody's touched it sits two levels above the door — so a bank's vault is a 10, the hardest lock in the city and the only one that needs a Locksmith of 10. Not every building has a safe at all, and one an owner has been paying on can sit anywhere he's taken it.
  4. Get out with the haul. Nothing is yours until you're back on the street.

Can't pick it? Kick it in. A door you haven't got the Locksmith for can still be forced — but you pay for it up front. The police are called the moment you swing, and the owner is told at once: there's no quiet minute to buy, and Stealth won't help you. Forcing takes actions in proportion to the lock (about 4 + 2 per level, less half a point for every point of Strength — that's muscle work, not skill work), so a flimsy door is quick and a serious one is a long, loud job you may well still be inside when the cars arrive. A good lock doesn't stop a crowbar — it costs you the time you needed. And a forced door stays broken: the place is standing wide open to anyone until somebody hangs a new one.

But a safe is a different animal. No amount of force opens a safe — not a crowbar, not a boot, not the strongest boss in Rookport. A container is Locksmith or nothing, always. So a smash-in gets you what's lying loose and not one thing more: the till, the stash, the good stuff all stay exactly where they are. That's the trade — the crowbar makes a burglar of anybody, but only the skill makes a good one.

And then the clock. About a minute after you're in, the alarm goes up and the nearest patrols are sent at your block. How long that really buys you depends on where they happen to be — and a patrol that wanders past with a clear view of you can end the job before the alarm ever rings. Stealth buys quiet minutes (about six more seconds a point). Get caught inside and it's an ordinary arrest: your standing Surrender/Resist choice decides what it costs.

The break-in card. While you're inside, a gold card opens by itself in the bar at the bottom, beside the log (on a phone, in the Details pane, which opens by itself). Its title says where you are and, beside it, the clock in big figures — ALARM once it's up — with a bar and a line saying what your quiet time is made of (60 s, +18 s for Stealth 3). Right under that, always on screen, are its two buttons: Search the room (opens the room, everything in it you can reach, with you on the other side — moving things costs no actions, but the clock runs) and Get out with the haul (Free; it reads just Get out while you've lifted nothing). Beside them (below them on a phone), in plain words: whether anybody has noticed yet and what the alarm will add to your heat; once the quiet time is over, that anybody who saw you can call the police, and what your standing Surrender / Resist answer will cost you if they catch you inside, with a button to change it; how full you are (weight and room, and what your car adds); what you've lifted so far and the heat walking out with it will add; the safe — its level against your Locksmith, Sure thing or Beyond you, and Crack it (4 actions), greyed with the reason and a link to Stats & skills when you can't; in a dealership, the showroom's top car — its quality and price, your Mechanic against its quality, your odds of getting it out, and Drive it out (14 actions); and a reminder that none of the goods is money until a fence buys them, with a button that opens the Directory on the pawn shops.

What's worth taking depends on the place. A burglary draws on what the building actually holds — its till (a cash tin in a house, a cash box where there's no counter), its stock, whatever the owner stashed — so a starved shop is a poor job and a full warehouse is worth the risk. On top of that, every kind of place has its own things lying about: silverware and a till out of a diner, a fur coat and a pocket watch out of a hotel room, chips off a casino floor, a ledger and a typewriter out of an office, food and a tool kit off a farm, jewellery out of a bedroom.

Stolen valuables — jewellery, silverware, a pocket watch, a fur, a radio set, a typewriter, a tool kit, medical supplies, casino chips, a small painting, a business ledger — are not sold in any shop. The only way to get one is to take it out of somebody's building, and the only people who'll buy are the fences: the pawn shop, the workshop and the garage's chop shop — in that order of generosity (see The three fences). They know what you are, and they price accordingly. The haul isn't money until you've moved it.

Somebody will know. Burgle a place and its owner gets told — the block, and roughly what it cost them. That goes for a boss's home too.

Some doors are never a job: the police station, the prison, the hospital and the courthouse; your own family's places and the place you work (Whose side it's on); and a rival family's stronghold, until a crew raid has broken its defense — then it's yours to try for half an hour, locks and all.

Locks you buy

Everything above is the other side of the same coin: your door is somebody else's job. So locks are something you own and pay for, on your home and on every building you hold — open the block card and there's a 🔐 Locks panel with the front door and the safe shown as pips, and every upgrade on offer with its price.

You start almost wide open, and that's deliberate. A new place comes with a level-1 door and no safe at all — the softest target in Rookport, and your locker is a shelf anyone can reach. The first few hundred dollars you spend on that door protect you better than a gun does.

It gets expensive fast — about $400 for the second level, $4,000 for the sixth, $19,000 for the last one — so a maxed door is something you work toward, not something you buy on day one. It takes any money — the cash on you first, then the card. And remember what you're buying against — a Locksmith of 10 opens anything in the city, so a good lock buys you the rest of the field, not immunity.

The panel tells you what each step actually gets you ("a burglar needs Locksmith 6 to get through instead of 5") and greys out what you can't afford yet rather than hiding it, so you can see the whole ladder from the bottom of it.

If somebody kicks your door in, the panel says so in red and offers you one thing: hang a new door. Until you do, your lock is irrelevant — the place is standing open and anyone can walk in, which is why you get told the instant it happens. Rehanging is priced off the door you had (a few hundred for a cheap one, a couple of thousand for a serious one) — far less than the lock cost you, because you're replacing a door, not buying the lock again. Your safe is untouched, and it's the only thing still holding. An unclaimed or NPC-run place gets a new door on its own after a few hours; yours waits for you. (tuning)

What you can actually carry

A haul is a matter of room, not a count. Everything worth stealing has a weight and a size, and you have two limits — and both have to fit. On your own two feet that's about 25kg and 40 litres: a duffel bag, and no more.

This is the whole decision of a burglary. The break-in card shows how full you are on both (weight and room, with what your car adds), and the room's panel shows what each thing weighs and how much space it takes before you move it.

Bring a car and the job changes shape. A car's hold is added on top of what you can carry yourself, and every model carries a different amount — so which car you drive to a job is a real decision, not a yes/no. A roadster adds very little (+45kg / +90L) because it's a fast car with no room in it. A sedan adds a useful load (+120kg / +260L). A box truck adds a great deal of space and not much weight tolerance by comparison (+500kg / +2,200L) — mostly empty volume, which is exactly what furs and radio sets need. Boosted street cars sit between them (a lifted delivery wagon is the poor man's truck; a clunker barely helps). Each car's boot is a separate hold again on top of that.

What you took, the place remembers. Everything you carry out of a place you're robbing — the till's cash, what was on its shelves, what was in its safe or on its gun rack — is your haul, and when the job ends with one, the owner hears about it (roughly how much you cleaned him out of), the place does a little worse for it, and it takes about 45 minutes to fill up again — go back sooner and you'll find it as you left it. The heat of a big haul follows you out. Walking off the block without leaving properly changes none of that: the place is just as robbed. Walk out with nothing, and nobody is any the wiser. (tuning)

The three fences

Three kinds of building will buy what you stole, and each one pays a different rate. The counter now tells you which you're standing at and what it pays, in cents on the street dollar — so the choice of where to unload a haul is yours to make rather than a thing you find out afterwards.

WhereWhat it isPays
Pawn shopThe proper fence — a man behind a grille who has seen everything~80¢ — the best rate in Rookport
WorkshopA back bench and no questions~65¢
GarageThe chop shop out back. It is a working garage out front; the trade happens behind it~60¢ — the worst rate in the city

Rookport's pawn shops sit in Little Sicily, Ironside, the Docks and the Row, and deliberately none downtown, so a haul always has to travel somewhere less respectable. Garages and workshops are everywhere — which is exactly the bargain: the nearest fence is the worst one. Carrying a big haul across town to a pawn shop is worth real money; dumping a tool kit at the garage next door is worth the walk you save.

All of them buy and never sell, all of them pay in dirty cash, and all of them are a bad deal. That gap is the point — the fence knows exactly how badly you want it off your hands.

The loan shark

The only credit in Rookport is a man in the back of a pawn shop. There are no bank loans and no credit cards — when you need money you haven't got, you step inside a pawn shop, and its card has The back room: his terms, how much he'll lend you, and — as you type an amount — what you'd owe him and by when. Borrow asks first, restating the loan (what you get, what you owe, what happens late), because a loan binds you.

Own a pawn shop and you run its shark. Its card carries your shark's desk, and you set everything yourself, standing in the shop:

You set
Lendswhether he lends at all — he's shut until you set your terms: it's your shop's money going out (buy a pawn shop, and the last owner's terms don't come with it)
Most to one man$100 to $100,000
Interest0% to 100%, for the whole term
Term1 to 14 days
Lends toanyone, your family only, your friends only (and your family), or nobody
Who collectswhich of your own crew go after a man who doesn't pay: one of your teams (the whole team goes, the men protecting its first man on his post too, and they go back to their post after), or men you pick one by one; a man who's hurt or out on a job stays home

What he lends comes out of your shop's till and safe, and what's paid back — and whatever your collectors take off a man — goes into its safe. The desk shows your book: who owes you, how much, and who's late. You're told when somebody borrows, pays you back in full, or is caught by your collectors. Pick nobody to collect and nobody goes — the late payer just gets later, and you're told to pick your men. The book goes with the shop: sell it and the new owner is owed; lose it to the wrecking ball and nobody owes anything. (A pawn shop in a family's name doesn't lend.) (tuning)

Speed & vehicles shorten travel. Your speed stat helps on foot; a vehicle makes trips faster and cheaper and lifts how much contraband you can haul:

VehiclePrice (tuning)TravelAdds to what you carryCrew seatsBoot (its own hold)
Sedan$5,000faster+120kg / +260L5200kg / 420L
Box truck$12,000a bit faster+500kg / +2,200L8900kg / 4,000L
Roadster$20,000fastest+45kg / +90L260kg / 120L

Boosted street cars (what you hotwire off the kerb — the roster your Driving skill opens up):

Street carAdds to what you carryCrew seatsBoot
Rusty clunker+35kg / +70L350kg / 110L
Beat-up sedan+50kg / +100L470kg / 150L
Boosted hatchback+55kg / +130L375kg / 200L
Stolen coupe+40kg / +75L355kg / 110L
Lifted delivery wagon+160kg / +600L5260kg / 950L

The lifted delivery wagon is the poor man's box truck — if you're planning a burglary and you don't own a truck, it's the one worth stealing first. (tuning)

Driving is drastic. Ten blocks is about three minutes on foot — and about a minute in the cheapest banger you can buy, under 45 seconds in a decent saloon, and a matter of seconds in a top-tier runner. Even the worst car on the road is roughly 2.8× walking pace, and the Driving skill cuts up to another 40% on top. A car saves actions as well as time, so it pays twice. The HUD always shows whether you're 🚗 behind a wheel or 🚶 on foot (with your real trip multiplier), trip estimates on the map use your actual ride, and the Assets tab shows your car's full numbers.

Your car is cover in a street fight. When you fight out on the block (not inside a building) with your ride beside you, you fight from behind it — a defense bonus that soaks some of the incoming damage, scaled to how big the car is (a small beater or roadster gives a little, a box truck is real cover). It applies against street NPCs, recruits and rival bosses alike — and a rival defending with their own car on the street gets the same benefit. Step inside a building and there's no car cover (it's out on the street). The Assets tab shows your ride's cover value.

Your cars carry the crew — a big vehicle is a war wagon. A crew operation has no limit on how many men go — a team goes whole. Send cars along — your ride and any of your cars on your block or the next — and their seats decide who rides (every seat counts the driver): a box truck seats 7, a little runabout 2, the tier-10 war wagon 8, so two box trucks carry 14 men to one target. Whoever has no seat walks there by his quickest way. The op launcher sums the seats of the cars you tick, and the Assets tab lists each car's seats.

Your car has a trunk — its own cargo hold. Separate from the load you carry on your person, every car has a trunk with its own weight and volume budget (a box truck's holds a huge 900kg / 4,000L, a roadster only 60kg / 120L). On the Assets tab you can load contraband into the trunk and take it back out — stow product there to keep your pockets free, or move a big load across town in one trip. Two things fill it for you: when you send your car on a Rob raid, the haul that won't fit your pockets overflows into the trunk (so a box truck brings back far more loot than crew on foot could carry); and the trunk travels with the car — wherever the car goes, its load goes, and nowhere else. Steal a new ride and your old one stays where you left it, with its own trunk — nothing is left behind, it's in a car you still own; go back for it, or send a man to bring it to you.

Getting in and out of your car. Your ride shows as a row in the left panel on the block where it sits — select it to get in or out, or to open its trunk. You only get the travel speed-up and the car's cover in a street fight while you're actually in it; step out and you're on foot, with the car left parked on the block.

A parked car really stays where you left it. Get out and walk (or ride an op, or get hospitalized) and your car doesn't follow you — it sits parked on that block until you go back and get in again (the game tells you where it is if you try to use it from afar; its trunk is over there too). And a parked car is exposed: any rival standing on that block can see it in their left panel and try to boost it — an owned car is a harder crack than a random street beater (locks, an alarm), but if they pull it off the whole car is gone, trunk cargo included, and you'll find a report telling you who took it. Boosting a rival's parked ride works the same in reverse: select it, size up the odds (Driving carries the job; it's loud, and you can't do it with the owner standing right there — protected newcomers' cars are off-limits), and Boost it: you drive off in it, and your old ride stays where you left it. A car in a bay inside a garage is off the street — no street boost reaches it — but it isn't a safe: a thief can break into the bay (see Your cars). (tuning)

Cars take damage — and damage costs you speed. Your ride has a condition (0–100%), and it is effectively the car's hit points: raids it's sent on as cover, boosting it in, and road chases all chip it down. A carjacked street beater arrives already battle-worn.

Every point of condition you lose costs half a point of top speed. There is no free band — a car that has taken any damage at all is genuinely slower, and you feel it on every trip. A saloon that does 66 km/h mint does 62 at 80% condition, 46 at 40%, and barely 34 on its last legs — walking pace with a fuel bill. At 10% or less it's broken down and won't move at all — the engine has gone, not the paint. Below 60% it also becomes thinner cover in a street fight. But a broken-down car is never lost to damage: wear and gunfire drop it to a barely-alive wreck and stop there — they can't take it below that, and a wreck is always recoverable. Call a tow from your phone to haul it to a garage, then repair it and drive it out. A car is only gone for good at 0%, and it never reaches 0% by accident — the only way there is someone deliberately finishing it off: you torch a wreck where it stands, or (later) a bomb takes it out.

And it happens the moment the damage does. This is the whole reason a chase is worth having: your speed isn't decided when you set off, it's asked for continuously. Take rounds through the engine block with a patrol car on your bumper and you slow down while they're still behind you — the gap you were opening stops opening, and a car you were escaping in becomes a car you're caught in. If the engine finally goes you're out and running on foot, which against a cruiser is not a plan. The same works in your favour: shoot up the car in front and it comes back to you.

Cars also wear out just from being driven. About one point of condition every seven kilometres — far too slow to watch, but a ride nobody ever services is noticeably down on power by the end of a round. The Assets tab shows the kilometres on the clock. It's cheap to put right and there's a garage in every district; the point is that the garage is somewhere you go, not only somewhere you limp to after a gunfight.

The game shows you this everywhere. The ride card on the Assets tab shows the real figure — Does 46 km/h (of 66 healthy) — so you can see what the dents are costing in the unit you're about to be chased in. Every trip estimate on the map already accounts for it.

A damaged car is also worth less — in proportion. A car is worth its value times its condition: that sedan worth $2,500 sound fetches $1,050 at 42%, and a wreck at 10% fetches a tenth. The same goes for what it counts in the rankings, and for a stolen car's fence price. Repairing before you sell usually pays for itself.

Fix it at a mechanic — every district has a garage, and car dealerships do repairs too. The 🔧 Repair button quotes the price (about $9 per missing point, cash). You can repair the car you're driving, or any car of yours where it is — on that garage's block or in its bays — without taking it out first. (tuning)

Call a tow truck — for any car of yours. A broken-down car (10% or less) won't drive — so from your phone (the Phone at the top of the right panel › Services; on a phone-sized screen Contacts › Phone, under Calls › Your cars), every car of yours a truck could come for has a row: where it stands, whether it runs, where the truck would take it, and Tow with its price. (A car that still runs can be towed too — parked across town, or left in the road: see below.) A real truck from a garage drives to the car, hooks it and hauls it to a bay at the nearest garage with one free for you (its rent runs from that day), or to its pound yard when there's none — for a fee (a call-out plus the distance — the cash on you first, then the card; the garage is paid). Travel over, repair it, and drive it out. (In a pound yard the tow is paid for, but the pound charges storage at the bay rent until you get the car out: pay the pound, then repair it there — see Tows and the pound.) This is the way to rescue a good car that died across town — but a car beaten all the way to 0% is destroyed and can't be towed, so don't let a chase run that far if you want to keep the car. A car that still runs (parked far away, your ride parked without you, a car left in the road) goes the same way, for the same price, but only into a bay at the nearest garage with one free for you — never the pound by your own call; when every bay in the city is taken, the row says so. Two calls never count on the same bay: once a truck is bringing a car to the last free bay at a garage, the next call goes to the next garage with one. If the bays still fill while the truck is on its way (somebody else's car takes the last one), a car that still runs is parked at the kerb by that garage instead, and you are told where — never the pound, no storage. Not the car you're sitting in (drive it there yourself), not a car your men have out, nor one already in a bay or the pound. The tow is a phone call: you need a phone switched on (from a cell, a smuggled phone, or one of the yard payphone's orders). The row's words follow the truck: a bay when it goes to a bay, the yard when it goes to the yard.

Or torch it where it died. A car that has actually broken down (10% or less) gets a 🔥 Torch it button on its sheet — you burn it and walk away on foot. Only a broken-down car can be destroyed this way, because this isn't a delete button: it's the way out of a seized ride stranding you three districts from the nearest garage. You get nothing for it — no scrap money — and the goods left in the boot burn with it (any cash in the boot comes out with you first). If you can get it to a mechanic (tow it, or it's near one), do that instead.

Gear wears out too. Every fight chips your (and your crew's) equipped weapon and armor a little, and gear stripped off a beaten mark comes damaged — 40–80% durability, shown as a 🔩 tag in the Inventory. A worn piece gives reduced attack/defense (down to half at 0%), so fresh-bought iron is genuinely better than battle loot. Take everything to a workshop and one button repairs every worn piece you own — equipped, stashed, and on your crew (about $2 per missing point); a workshop in ruins fixes nothing till it's rebuilt. (tuning)

Attack from behind the car. When your crew hit a building with the car sent along, they don't rush in on foot — they fight from behind the vehicle's armor. The defenders' return fire is blunted, scaled to the car's size (a beater shaves a little off; a box truck soaks a real chunk), so a raid rolled in behind big iron costs you fewer casualties. It's never quite as strong as fighting from inside a fortified building, so a well-dug-in garrison still has the edge — but sending the car turns a raid from a foot charge into an armored assault.

Every car has a quality, 1 to 10. It's what the car is worth, how good it is, and how hard it is to steal, all in one number. A quality 1 car is a slow, fragile $250 rustbucket. A quality 10 is fast, tough, rare and runs to five figures. There are thirty cars, three at every tier — and the three aren't the same car with different paint: a runner is quick and cramped, a saloon is the balanced one, a hauler is slow but carries the world.

Buy one at a car dealership. Eight cars stand on its forecourt, quality 1 to 7. The top three tiers are sold one at a time: each of the city's two dealers keeps one top car in its showroom window — usually a quality 8, sometimes a 9, and now and then a 10 (about one car in eight) — and sells it over the desk like the rest, from the bank, by card (anything above quality 1 is clean money). The car in the window costs more than its book price — the dealer asks about 20% over it (tuning): a quality-8 saloon is about $23,000, a 10 $80,000–92,000. What it's worth to you afterwards — sold back, or on the rankings — is still the book price. When it's sold, the window stands empty and the next one arrives two days later; a car nobody buys goes back after three days and another comes in. So if it's a 10 you're after, keep an eye on both windows.

Every car at a kerb belongs to somebody on that block. Rookport isn't a city where every corner has a full kerb — most blocks have no car at all, and a block never has more than two. What's parked there is what the people who live there drive: a shopkeeper keeps better iron than a barfly, a made man better than either, and a rich district is thick with cars a poor one never sees. But the top of the roster is rare at a kerb: a quality 8 or 9 is about one car in thirty downtown (rarer still on the Row, and nowhere else), and a quality 10 is never parked on a street — there aren't many of them in Rookport, and the people who own one keep it off the kerb. So where you go to steal is a real decision, and an empty street is an honest answer rather than a bug.

And the owner might be standing next to it. If he's out on the pavement he can see exactly what you're doing, and your odds are worse: part of your clean chance turns into a plain failure — he sees you and shouts, and you back off. Nobody calls the police over it, and the car's own alarm is no likelier than without him. Wait for him to step inside or wander round the corner and the same car is markedly easier. The viewer says which it is, in words, before you commit. Take his car and it's gone from that kerb — he doesn't have another one for a few hours.

Stealing a car is the Mechanic skill against the car's quality. Pick a car at the kerb and the viewer opens its card — what it is, what it's worth, who owns it, and your odds on it. On your own block the card draws all three outcomes as a colour bar; from a block you're only watching it shows just the clean chance. The other cars at the same kerb sit under Also at this kerb, each with your clean chance — pick one to open its card. The odds work like this:

On the car's own block you see all three numbers as a colour bar before you spend the action, so reaching for something out of your depth is always your choice, never a surprise. Richer districts keep better cars at the kerb — so where you go to steal matters, and the quiet end of town is where a low Mechanic learns the trade.

A crew member who knows engines riding with you is worth +1 level. Whatever you take, you drive off in it — your old ride stays where you left it, and the car you took is hot.

Your cars — as many cars as you like. There's no cap: buy, steal and keep as many as you want. What limits a fleet is where you can keep it and what that costs — and you can give a car to one of your men, so he drives it on his trips. Every car you own is somewhere real, all the time — your ride (the one you drive), and every other car of yours standing where it was last left: at a kerb, in the road, on a dealer's forecourt, in a bay inside a garage, on a tow truck, in the pound, or on the move with one of your men at the wheel. A car only ever gets anywhere by being driven or towed there. Empire › What you own › Your cars lists them all — Your cars · 7 (2 exposed) — each with its condition, what it's worth, hot if it's stolen, the man it's given to, and where it is in words (in a bay at Moretti's Garage, Ironside — $1.19 a day, at the kerb, Mulberry and 5th — exposed, Vinnie is driving it, on the tow truck, in the pound), with Map and Travel. Your cars are on the map too, in your colour, with the initial of the man each is given to.

Where you can keep them.

Getting about with them.

Give a car to one of your men. On a man's card (Crew), His car gives him one of your cars — one car to a man, one man to a car (it asks first if the car is already someone else's: It's Sal's — give it to Vinnie instead?). He drives it on his trips whenever it's his quickest way, and the men going the same way ride with him, up to its seats. Your crew always take the fastest way they have: walking, the car given to him, the two nearest of your cars that are nobody's, a seat in a car going their way, or a car of his own — whichever gets him there first. Any of your men can drive (his Driving makes it faster); a hurt man never drives — he rides, or walks. Your own ride is never theirs to take: it goes with them only when you lend it to an op, or Give it to… a man while it's parked. When you drive off with bodyguards, your car takes as many as its seats (every seat counts the driver: a 4-seat car takes you and three); the rest follow in another of your cars on your block, else on foot. Let … drive (on your ride's card, when a man is sitting with you) puts him at the wheel: his Driving sets the speed until you take it back.

Stolen cars are hot. However you take a car — off a kerb, out of the traffic, off a dealer's lot, out of a showroom window, a rival's parked ride, a fleet car, or a bay — you're at its wheel where it stood, your own ride stays where you left it (with its own trunk), and the car is hot for good: whoever holds it, it sells only to a garage at the fence price, counts at that in the rankings, and fetches no more on the boat at the docks. You can't take a car while your own ride is standing in the road on that block (park it first).

Your cars can be stolen — even from a garage. A car of yours at a kerb or in the road can be boosted by a rival who walks up to it — the parked-ride odds (Driving, Intelligence and Stealth; 8% to 75%), 12 actions — unless you, or the man it's given to, are standing on the block, or you're a protected newcomer. A car in a bay can only be taken by a break-in: a thief on the garage's block sees the bays' cars by make and condition (never whose), and Break in costs 16 actions and real heat, at odds of 10%, plus 3% for each level of Mechanic and of Stealth and 1% for each point of Intelligence, less 4% for each level of the garage's security (5% to 60%) — fail and the alarm calls the law. If it works, the car rolls out of the door with him at the wheel, and you're told. A thief can't break into his own garage's bays.

Tows and the pound. A car of yours left in the road is towed like your ride (see Parking, traffic and the tow truck), and so is a car left at a kerb too long. On the hook the car is on the truck; it's in the pound when the truck gets back. A car in the pound stands in the garage's yard by its door, where no thief can reach it — but the pound isn't free, and it doesn't keep a car for ever:

If you owe a lot's days or a bay's rent on a car when it's towed or stolen, it's paid then, from the first money you have.

When a garage changes hands or is knocked down. Sold or captured, the cars in its bays stay — the rent goes to the new owner. Razed, or turned into a business with no bays, its cars roll out of its door one at a time, to be driven away (the road's rules apply); the rest wait in their bays rent-free.

Your ride's card gets Give it to… while it's parked, and Let … drive while a man is sitting with you.

Every car shows you its full sheet. Select your ride, any car of yours, or a rival's parked car and the viewer lays out top speed (with the loss from damage), carry capacity in kg and litres, boot size, crew seats, street cover, condition, sticker price and what it sells for right now. The dealership and your cars list the same numbers on every row, so you can compare before you spend. Click the cars at the kerb and you'll see each one's quality and your exact odds of taking it.

Mechanic pays twice, and there are two ways to fix a car.

If your Mechanic isn't up to it, the Repair button is greyed and tells you the level you'd need, and to take the car to a garage instead. There's one in every district.

Driving now means purely what it says: how fast and cheaply you travel, and how quickly you can pull away from a job.

Money: clean vs dirty

Your boss holds two purses, and the top bar names them:

What each thing takes:

The bank. Draw cash out at any of the city's three banks — in person, inside, while it's open (6am–6pm on the city's clock: one real hour open, the next shut). Once it's in your pocket it's cash, and cash is dirty: it goes back into the account only through a legal business's books (below).

Money always comes from somewhere. A shop pays for what you sell it out of its own till, then its safe — and a shop with nothing in either can't buy, so a thin till buys two of your five and says so. What you pay at a counter goes into its till; a car dealer pays for your old car out of his own cash; a wage comes out of the employer's till; protection money comes out of the shop's takings; the hospital's fee is the hospital's. A business's till fills through the day with what its customers spend.

And every dollar you pay goes to somebody. The tradesmen are the nearest workshop — cameras, traps, bugs, locks, repairs, refits and rebuilds, fortifications, your hideout's contractor, a field's drainage — but never your own (own the workshop and you still pay the next one). Seed comes off a farm, car parts off a garage's counter, and the pound is a garage. A bribe, or cash the police seize, goes into the nearest police station's safe. A building nobody runs, rent on a block nobody owns, a family's lawyers and the help-wanted notice go to the city's coffers at the courthouse. Your crew's and your staff's pay goes home to their neighbourhood. Buying a shop pays its owner — and he takes what's in its till and safe home with him, so you start with an empty till. Cash you keep in your car's boot or your home locker is never lost with the car or the lease: it comes out into your pocket (on an eviction, the landlord keeps it).

The townspeople have money — and only so much. Rookport's people start each round with a few days' spending at home, and everything the city's customers pay comes out of it: a shop's takings, what sells off your shelf, the rent your tenants pay — and what a man has in his pocket when he buys from you in the park or at your dealer's corner. Most of it comes back to them as wages — a business pays its workers, and the city, the police, the hospitals and the banks pay theirs. A neighbourhood whose people run short spends less: its shops take in less, rents come in short, your shelf sells slower, and in a broke park nobody has the money for what you're selling. What a man carries — in the street, or waiting to be hired at a bar — came out of his household too. And a fence is a garage's till: a car you fence is paid for out of the nearest garage's cash — if it has none, nobody's buying, and the car is dumped.

The townspeople keep their savings at the city's bank. What a household has put by is clean money at the bank — and nobody can rob it, not you and not anybody else: a deal on a corner, a lifted wallet or a lookout run off his block only ever pays what is in somebody's pocket that day. When a district runs short, the bank prints more — a little each night, and only so much a month — so the shops don't empty out late in the round. It doesn't lend, it never takes the money back during the round, and you can't rob it. Like everything else, it all goes when the round ends.

The townspeople work and shop — for real. Every townsperson in Rookport has a home and a job: a flat in a house, and a place to work — a shop, a bar, a restaurant, a club, the casino, a hotel, a garage, a workshop, a factory, a warehouse, a farm, the docks, an office, or the courthouse, a police station, the hospital, the prison. You'll see them walk (or drive) to work in the morning — the bars' and the clubs' people in the evening — work their shift inside, and get paid at the end of it out of that place's till. Then they go shopping at places open at that hour — a meal, a drink, a night out, a gun, a car — paying out of their pockets into the till (your shop's too: those are your customers walking in, and they buy off your shelf at your prices), and go home, where what's left goes into their household's savings. At night most of them are asleep at home. So:

Who the city's people are. Everybody you meet in Rookport has a job, a home and a day of his own, and his card says so. Job: is what he does, with a line about it — a Grocer, a Barkeep, a Line cook, a Farmhand, a Warehouse guard, a Dealer, or Out of work. Works for: is who employs him, his hours and his pay — a corner store in Little Sicily · 06:00–18:00 · $8.33 a shift from the till. The list of people on a block leads with each person's job.

Your net worth (the rankings score) counts both purses — the bank and the cash on you in full, cash kept anywhere else (a boot, your locker, a stash, a safe) at half — your goods, your buildings at their price and your cars and gear at half — less what you owe a loan shark. There's no other credit in the city: see The loan shark.

Money in & out — your books

Empire › Money in & out is the answer to "if I do nothing, what happens?" It reads top to bottom in four parts:

One-off money never appears here: a robbery, a fenced haul, selling a car. Those are things you did. This screen is about what keeps happening.

Two things it's there to make obvious, and both catch people out:

Miss crew payroll once and the crew walk. Fall three days behind on rent and you're evicted, and your home locker goes with the unit. Both of those are visible here days before they happen.

Making money — the criminal ladder

Early game — rob and shake down. With little to your name, the fastest money is street-level: pickpocket, rob or attack the civilians and shopkeepers on a block, and rob small shops for their till and stock.

Three ways to take from a person. Select anyone on the block and you get the moves. Attack (−15) skips the talking — straight into a real-time fight; put them down and everything they have is yours (they go down hurt, not dead: the ambulance takes them). Rob (−12) is the shakedown: an intimidation check comes first — if they fold they hand over their whole inventory (wallet, phone, worn gear, pocket goods) with no fight and less heat; if they don't, it turns into the same fight. The police, SWAT and gangsters never fold, so there's no Rob on them — only Attack. Pickpocket (−8) is the quiet one: you walk up and try. You don't know what's in a man's pockets until your hand is in them — nothing on his card, or anywhere else, tells you (people carry a wallet, often a phone, the odd pack of cigarettes or a bottle — worse in rougher company). If it works, his pockets open in the loot window, and you take what you want while you're still beside him — about a minute; walk off, or let him walk off, and they close. Worn gear can't be lifted — that takes a fight. Stealth keeps a pickpocket quiet; a botch against someone who fights back can hurt. A lift that comes off, the mark never felt; a botch, he felt, and he shouts — but nobody calls the police over a wallet, not him and not a passer-by, and the screen tells you when he shouts. Only a patrolman on the block sees it, clean or botched: he arrests you on the spot and calls the cars, a petty call — they come unhurried, at 24 km/h, slower than a patrol, with no siren until they have seen you. The car drives to that block and looks round it; get two blocks away or through a door and they lose you. Stand there, and they take you. A man who is already Wanted is looked for further off.

Intimidation. When you rob an NPC, they may just fold — handing over their cash, phone, and gear with no fight and less heat — if you sufficiently out-menace them. Your menace comes from your fighting stats and level, your equipped weapon (weighted heavily), and your escorting crew; their nerve rises if they're armed or fight back. Unarmed civilians fold easily, and a weapon makes robbing them near-certain — this is the reliable early-game income loop. Armed marks and tougher NPCs are more likely to swing back, and police, SWAT and gangsters never fold. The same weighing decides whether you can walk into an occupied building: a place with guards inside, its owner standing there, or police on the block lets you through only if you out-menace the whole room at once (and a room with a gangster in it never stands aside at all) — and if they won't stand aside, a real-time fight breaks out then and there (you and your escort against all of them, behind whatever cover the building gives them). Winning that fight buys you the room, not the money — you still have to search it, one thing at a time, with the police already on their way. The game shows this before you commit, as an Intimidation gauge on the Walk-in button: it pits your side's total fighting power — everyone's HP + attack + defense — plus your intimidation stat against theirs. They stand aside only when you reach about 135% of their force; below that they'll fight even a battle they'd lose, so raw superiority isn't enough on its own — your intimidation stat is the lever that tips a close standoff. Police and gangsters never fold. (Numbers are tuning.)

Working a corner — dealing on open ground. Every walkable empty tile in Rookport — parks, fields, woods, footpaths, bridges — is a place you can stand and sell contraband to the people on it. It is the opposite trade to a fence in every way. A fence buys wholesale, instantly, in any quantity, and asks nothing. A corner:

That last line is the whole decision. A park is busy and profitable and watched. A wood is quiet, safe, and usually has nobody in it to buy. Money is always dirty. Only contraband sells — nobody buys groceries off a man in a park.

(The river isn't open ground — you can only cross water at a bridge, so you can never stand on it.)

What each crime teaches you. Every crime that comes off is worth some XP — the riskier, the more — and so is each of Sal's contracts. Only the crime that comes off counts: a botched pickpocket teaches you nothing, and a job only teaches you once you've walked out of it with something (carried off to a cell or to the hospital, you learned nothing).

What you didXP
A hand in a man's pockets4
A man who folds and hands it over6
A delivery truck stopped, something taken off it6
A safe cracked with something in it6
A shut place broken into, out with a haul6 + 2 a door level — a house 8, a corner store 10, a bar 12, an office 14, a gun shop 16
A street deal6
A business that agrees to pay you protection8
A place held up with people in it, out with a haul10
A car off a dealer's forecourt8 + the car's quality
A car off the kerb2 + the car's quality
Your crew's raid that wins (you planned it)rob 10 · wreck 15 · seize 20 · hit the garrison 8
A fight wonby how hard it was — a civilian 5, a gangster 17, a police officer 26
A set at the gym4–7
One of Sal's contracts20

(tuning) Sal's first contract and five good pockets is level 2 on your first day; steady play is about level 5 in a week.

Trading off real shelves. Every shop's counter now sells real stock off real shelves: the corner store carries cigarettes, liquor, household goods and food; the gun shop guns and ammo; the bar drinks; the diner food; the gym supplements; the dealership auto parts; the farm cheap food at the gate; ports and warehouses hold the big import stacks. The counter shows how many are on the shelf — buying draws that stock down for everyone, and a shop can genuinely be sold out until supply comes back. Selling puts your goods onto that shop's shelf — including stolen stock you're fencing.

Where the goods come from. The city's supply chain is real: factories turn out cigarettes, household goods, auto parts, ammunition and supplements (and sell wholesale at the gate — cheapest in town after the source), farms grow food, and the port lands imports off the boats — foreign liquor, cigarettes, guns and worse. Food takes two hops: it leaves the farm for a grocer, and the grocers supply the kitchens — restaurants and hotels buy from the corner shop, not from the field. The full picture, generated live from the game's own tables, is on the goods manifest. Producer sites build up stock over the day, waiting for delivery runs — or for you to buy bulk cheap and haul it to where it sells dear. At the top of the price ladder sit the service venues: hotels (room service and the bar), casinos (comped drinks and smokes) and offices (the supply closet) pay the city's dearest prices for their stock.

Delivery trucks — watch the roads. When a shop runs low, a delivery truck loads at the nearest stocked producer and drives the streets to restock it — you can see the amber freight trucks driving the streets on the map, following the roads and turning at corners. Hold one up: catch a truck crossing your own block, click it, and stick it up — it costs actions and adds heat, and nobody calls the police over a load (a cop on your block who sees it still arrests you), but the load is yours up to what you can carry. A robbed run never arrives: the shop it fed stays dry. Every truck has a driver — a real townsperson the business sends with it, by day its own delivery driver. Hold it up and he bolts (the line names him); click a truck and its card shows who is driving: his job, who he works for, his hours and pay, and where he lives. And a load is paid for when it arrives — the shop pays the producer's own price out of its till and safe, so a shop with nothing in either gets no truck, and that includes yours: keep money in your shop or its shelf empties. That's the squeeze — starve a rival's front by hitting its suppliers, or camp the routes for freight worth stealing. (For goods without a local producer chain — drinks — shelves still restock on their own over the day.)

Gear and weapons ride the same trucks. Nothing on a shop's rack appears out of nowhere either. Rookport makes its own cloth and timber — flat caps, work pants, leather jackets and baseball bats come off a factory line. It does not make guns. Pistols, SMGs, kevlar, steel helmets and trench knives are landed at the port, sit in the dock yard, and are carried to the gun shops by truck. Three things follow from that, and all of them are playable:

Shortages move prices. A shop with bare shelves charges more for what little it has (up to about +60%) and pays over the odds for stock brought to its counter (up to about +30%) — so hauling goods into a starved shop is a real trade. And a shop that has nothing to sell earns its owner less until supply returns — cutting a supply line hits the owner's pocket, not just the shelf. (All numbers tuning.)

Contraband trading. The classic loop: buy cheap, move it, sell dear. Import hubs (ports, warehouses) price goods low; demand points (stores, crack houses, gun shops) price high — but a counter can only pay what's in its till and safe, so a big haul may take two or three counters to shift. Black-market goods — cigarettes, bootleg liquor, narcotics, firearms — trade in dirty cash, and travel + crime add heat along the way. Phones sit on both sides: a factory makes them, a corner shop or gun shop sells them off a real shelf (any money) — and one lifted off somebody's pocket is the same item, which a fence will take without asking where it came from.

Wholesale hubs — your supply line. The port and warehouses are wholesale vendors for contraband: because they import continuously, their black-market stock is deep — always available (you're never turned away by a bare shelf the way you are at a retail counter), and buying by the crate (10 at a time) gets you a wholesale discount (about 15% off). That makes the docks the reliable way to keep a street dealer stocked — far steadier than hoping robbery turns up product. Buy cheap in bulk at the hub, haul it to a demand venue or your dealer's corner, and sell high. The shop counter shows a 📦 Wholesale hub banner and a Buy 10 (bulk) button when you're at one.

Legal goods carry no heat. The consumer goods (household goods, food, supplements, ammo, auto parts) are over-the-counter: you buy them with any money, and a counter pays you in cash out of its till when you sell — which makes it dirty, like every counter's cash. That opens honest buy-low/sell-high routes — farm food to the grocer, port household goods to the corner store — with no heat on the goods themselves; to turn the takings clean, run them through a legal business's books.

Carrying & storing stock. On foot you can only carry a small load (~15 units) — you can't move much product on your person. A vehicle lifts that a lot (its carry bonus rides on top of your on-foot limit). Your car also has a trunk — its own separate hold (see Vehicles) that you load and unload on the Assets tab — good for moving a big load across town without a building. To hold real quantities, store goods in a building you own: deposit contraband into its storage (which holds far more than you can carry) and withdraw it later up to your carry room. Stored stock is robbable, so a stash worth keeping wants a guard on the block.

Production rackets. A racket is a business of its own — one business per building. Switch a building you own to the racket of its size (see Every building has a size, below) and it makes its good into its own back room, a day at a time. What it makes piles up on the building's shelf — pick it up with 🎒 Move things under Honest like anything else, then sell it at a demand venue (or leave it on the shelf of a shop you own and let it sell itself):

SizeRacketMakes
smallMoonshine stillliquor, ~1.0 a day
smallCigarette roomcigarettes, ~1.5 a day
mediumDrug labnarcotics, ~0.5 a day
mediumChop shopauto parts, ~0.8 a day
largeGun worksfirearms, ~0.7 a day
largeDistilleryliquor, ~2.5 a day

(A farm works differently — you sow its fields one at a time. See Working the land below.) The other two rackets — the crack house (small) and the gambling den (medium) — take money over the counter instead of making something. Station crew on worker duty at a production racket to boost its output (+50% each — see Crew). (Rates are tuning.)

Working the land out in the Greenbelt. The countryside north of town isn't scenery. Every farmstead up there is worked by farmhands and can be bought like any other building — and once it's yours, each open field around it is a plot you work yourself.

Two decisions per field, and they're separate.

Grow vegetables as cover. Three plots of veg and one of weed is a legitimate farm with a secret in it: the vegetables are real income, real deliveries, and a real reason for trucks to be coming and going.

It grows while you're away. Every sown plot puts its crop into the barn over real time and stops at a cap that also scales with your land — so come back and there's something to shift.

Which farm you buy still matters more than that you bought one. The block panel shows the open fields on every farm, owned or not ("6 open fields — prime growing land"), so scout the greenbelt on the map before you spend a penny. Across the district the spread runs from 2 fields to 6, and each one is a plot you could be working.

And then you have to move it. A bale of marijuana weighs almost nothing and takes up nine litres — a man on foot can carry four. A box truck carries forty. The farm gate buys it back for about $24, a crack house pays $41 and a dance club $45, so the money was never in the growing: it's in the drive. That's the whole shape of the route — cheap to start, quiet, miles from anybody, and worth nothing until you own something to haul it in.

Protection rackets. Instead of taking a shop over, you can extort an unowned NPC business on your tile for protection money — a daily dirty cut (a share of its prosperity-scaled income, paid out of its till — a shop that's been cleaned out pays nothing until its customers fill the till again) that you skim for as long as you hold the racket, without owning or running the place. A more prosperous shop pays a bigger cut, but extorting it also slows its prosperity growth (you're bleeding its profit). Player-owned businesses are immune — you can't run a racket on another boss's front. To hold a racket against rivals, station a guard (a crew member on guard duty) on the block: their presence blocks other players from robbing or muscling in on it. Without a guard, a stronger rival can take the racket over. Claiming the building outright ends any racket on it and switches you to its full clean income.

One man on your crew for every place you protect. A shop pays because it's afraid of somebody, and that somebody is your men — so you can hold as many places as you have men on your crew. You don't count yourself: with no crew, you can't protect anything. The men don't have to stand there — they're free to escort you, guard, deal, train or go on a job, and a man who's wounded or away still counts; he's still yours. A boss keeps at most two men a level (twenty at level 10), so twenty places is the most anybody holds. The cut is 40% of the place's takings. The shakedown row shows your men against the places you hold and is greyed, with the reason, when you need another man; Empire › What you own lists each place as paying, on a day's grace, or not paying, with how long it has been a man short and how long until it's lost.

A shakedown is something you say to a person, and the person can say no. You do it from inside the place, face to face, and only when somebody's actually in there — an empty room can't be frightened, so the hour matters here exactly as it does to a burglary.

Three things can happen, and the gauge on the Extort button tells you which before you commit:

Not every till is yours to lean on. You don't shake down your own family's places, a clanmate's racket, or the place you work — and a rival family's places pay nobody protection: ground is taken from a family with a crew capture op. Muscling in on a friend's racket is allowed, and ends the friendship.

Nerve goes up with what the business is worth and with how many people are watching you try it. Which is why a lone, unarmed, unknown boss gets laughed out of a busy shop, and the same man with a pistol, one friend at his shoulder, or a name people have heard, does not. Come back with one of the three.

Legal businesses & laundering. Own a legal business — any business that isn't a racket, a house or a bunker: a bar, a restaurant, a convenience store, a pawn shop, a gun shop, a garage, a workshop, a gym, an office, a dance club, a car dealership, a hotel, a casino, a warehouse or a factory — and it launders: put cash in its safe (🎒 Move things) and its books turn it into clean money in your bank, a little a day — about $25 a day with nobody on the books, $27.50 more for each employee (a city day; $300 and $330 over a real day), less the 15% the books cost (tuning). The card's The books row says how much is going through and what it washes a day, with Put cash in to open the cash panel right there. Until it's washed it's cash in a safe, so a safecracker can still take it. The usual setup: a racket makes the dirty money, a legal business washes it.

You can staff it with civilian employees (up to 4 per building). Each employee, per city day (tuning):

Miss payroll and the staff walk.

You don't have to be a criminal. You can hold down an honest legal job for a steady, clean paycheck — lower than crime, but no heat and no risk.

Your home is a real block. Everyone lives somewhere, and your residence is an actual housing building on the map. A house is one household: once a boss lives in it, nobody else can move in. You start in a cheap place in a house nobody else lives in, in your own part of town if there's one free. Stand on any house and the card says whether it's taken (never by whom) or free; if it's free you can 🔑 Move in (4 actions plus the first day's rent) and that becomes home. From inside, the card also shows the house's rent roll: how many of its flats the townspeople who live there fill, and what they pay its landlord a day (from the street you only see whether it's taken). Only the people who really live there pay — an empty flat pays nothing — and once a boss makes a house his home, its townspeople move out and stop paying it. There are three grades:

GradeRentHome lockerCover at home
Cold-water roomdistrict rate20 units—
Apartment×2.260 units+3 defense
Top-floor place×4.5150 units+6 defense

Rent scales with the district on top of that — ~$4.17 a day in the greenbelt, ~$4.58 in Little Sicily where you start, $15 downtown (a city day: $50, $55 and $180 over a real day). You can ⬆️ move up a grade any time, from the block card or the Assets tab.

Moving up costs a deposit, not a purchase price. You're renting either way, so the up-front is three real days of the new rent — about $363 for an apartment in Little Sicily, against the $4,800 it would cost to buy the whole row house you're standing in. The real price of a better address is the rent afterwards: a top-floor place at $20.67 a day against a cold-water room's $4.58 is over $5,000 across a round. So move up when your income can carry the rent, not when you've saved a lump sum — and if the rent gets away from you, arrears and eviction are waiting.

The home locker. Your place holds goods off your body — move them there with 🎒 Move things under Honest, the same panel that moves everything else. Anything in the locker is safe from a street death, where a killer strips only what you're carrying. (An eviction, though, hands the lot to your landlord.)

Cover at home. Get jumped inside your own place and the walls count: a better grade adds real defense to the fight.

Somebody has to call the police — and nobody calls over a small crime. The law doesn't appear because a crime happened — it appears because a person who would pick up a phone saw it, and only three things make anybody pick it up: a murder, a place robbed with its people in it (a hold-up, or a car taken off a dealer's forecourt in its business hours) and an attack on a police officer, finished or not. Then whoever saw it — a shopkeeper, a customer in the shop, a passer-by in the street — is a witness, and he calls unless you stop him first (see Witnesses, next). Nobody calls the police over a small crime — a picked pocket, a mugging, a fight (the man you beat lies hurt, not dead, and the ambulance takes him), a car taken, a corner deal, a truck held up, a wagon stopped, a lookout run off, a bug planted: not the victim, not a passer-by, not the man behind the counter. Only a cop on your block who sees it acts. An alarm calls with nobody watching at all (a forced door, a burglary clock running out, a garage's alarm, a showroom's alarm after closing, a car's own alarm on a bad fumble). Gangsters never call the police — not rival bosses, not crew, not the man you just took a swing at. So a murder on a crowded street brings a squad car and the same one on an empty dock brings nobody, and where you pick a fight is now a decision worth making. Your boss sheet records who called it in last time, so you can see what gave you away. (You still fumble for your keys afterwards either way — the getaway delay is about you, not about the law being told.)

Witnesses: everyone who saw it, and the minute or two they give you. Do one of those three things with no cop on your block and no alarm going off, and nobody phones at once. Everyone who saw it — the townspeople on your block, on your side of the door — becomes a witness: he stops where he stands, and a red !!! shakes over his head, on the map and over him in a room, quicker in his last fifteen seconds. Never a witness: a gangster, crew or a boss, the law on duty (an officer on his shift arrests you himself), a man lying hurt, a man at the wheel, your own staff, or anybody on the side that did it. You are told at once, on the action's line and in an urgent notice — 2 people saw it. Each one will call the police unless you stop him — and the police banner lists them live (see When the law is coming, you can't miss it). Each one calls a minute to two minutes later, real time, counted from the end of the fight you are in — a hold-up's fight for the room, or the fight your Attack started — and the calls are staggered, so you can deal with them one after another. There are three ways to stop him:

Leave him alone and he calls. The first call brings the police to where he saw it, not to where you are now, and every other witness of that crime puts his phone away. Nobody calls once you are dead, jailed or in the law's hands. A patrol that joined the fight saw it for itself, so nobody needs to call (see A patrol passing your fight joins it, below). A man who saw two crimes of yours waits on the worse of the two — one man, one call — and his clock runs on. A witness can't be hired while he waits: the line-up's Hire says He saw what you did — he won't take your money, and no boss's man takes him on off the street. When the last witness of a crime is stopped you are told Nobody's calling. You're clear — unless a cop on this block sees you — never while another of yours still waits, never after a patrol made you Wanted, and never once you are jailed. A cop killing has no witnesses: every patrol car is already hunting you.

The law that sees it doesn't call — it moves in. A patrolman on your block (on your side of the door), or a patrol car's officers right there — from the car they see the street, not into a room; on foot, the room they followed somebody into — don't phone anybody. They shout, and two seconds later their hand is on your collar: you're arrested where you stand, the way your standing Surrender / Resist answer says (quietly into the county jail, or a fight with the law), and the message names who saw it. Off the block, or through a door, in those two seconds, and it's a chase instead — the cars were called too. A cop who's in a fight of his own doesn't see what you do beside him.

A patrol passing your fight joins it. An officer on foot, or a patrol car's officers, who come onto the block of a fight do not break it up: they walk into it. They take the side of any officer in it, on duty or off. Otherwise they go against whoever started it. If that was you, a patrol saw you start it and you're Wanted on the spot — heat 60, the fight's crime on your record as seen, and an urgent line: A patrol saw you start it — you're Wanted. Officer Rita joins the fight against you. If somebody jumped you, they fight beside you — self-defence is allowed — and nothing goes on your record for it: Officer Rita steps in on your side — Jumper started it. From then on it is a fight with the police: they radio for backup, and if they beat the starter down they take him in. The fight card tags each of them passing patrol and says it in one line — A passing patrol: Officer Rita was passing and joined the fight on Nuala's side — and keeps backup for the men of the cars the radio called. While an officer stands in the fight, a surrender is to the police: give up against them and they take you in (the short sentence for what they saw, your men with you), never the other boss; with them on your side there is nobody to give yourself up to, so the button is greyed — The officers are on your side — Flee if you want out. Once every officer in the fight is down, a surrender is an ordinary one again. When nobody standing in it started it (a loan shark's collectors, say), the patrol fights for the man they came for, and whoever wins, the collectors take nothing: the debt still stands, and they'll be back; a contest's stakes stay where they were. If the law saw you do something yourself, you go in for that once the fight is over. A fight your crew starts on a raid is never joined. (The AI families' bosses are the families' own business: a patrol may fight beside you against one, but never makes him Wanted.) So look around before you do it: the line on every crime that says who would call the police names the law first — a patrolman on the block, the officers in a patrol car — and you can't lie low in front of them either.

Your legs have two gears. Walking is your everyday pace and it comes off your Speed stat — 9 km/h untrained, up to 12 well trained — and it applies to every step you take on foot, across a block or across the city. Running is 1.8× that, and it is breath, not a setting: you have a little over two blocks of it in the legs, it drains by the metre while you run, it takes about a minute and a half to come back, and emptying it leaves you winded — walking only for half a minute while you get your wind back. You can't start a sprint on an empty tank. Speed buys a slightly bigger tank, never a way to travel: running is for the twenty seconds that matter.

Everybody runs the same way. Residents, other bosses and the police on foot have the same walk off their Speed, the same sprint, the same breath and the same half-minute winded when they empty it. A run lasts only as long as the breath: a walk across the block or a trip on foot goes at a sprint for as far as your breath carries you, then at a walk — and a walk you stop short gives back the breath you didn't use. Once you've got your wind back (and a quarter of a tank), you can sprint again.

It fires when it should. Two switches sit beside your name: Auto — on by default — breaks you into a run by yourself when it's an emergency: you're in a fight, you're being chased, or the law is on its way to a job you just did. Run is the manual one, for when you want to move fast for your own reasons. The bar between them is your breath. Running costs no actions; what it costs is the wind you might need in a minute.

You can see what everybody is doing. On the map, a man running trails streaks behind him; one who's winded puffs; a man in a fight has a red ring beating on him and a line to the man he's facing — gold tracers and a muzzle flash for a gun, a red line and a burst for a blow, a faint dashed line while he closes in; a man down is greyed out with a red cross. It's the same on you, on anybody walking past, and on a group standing together (which shows the loudest thing any of them is doing). In the lists, a little icon beside a name says it too (🏃 running · 💨 winded · 🔫 shooting · 👊 hand to hand · ⚔ closing in or caught in a fight · 🩸 down) — hover it for the words.

And everything else they do. Whatever a man has just done shows over him for a few seconds, and what he's in the middle of shows for as long as it lasts — so you can see the street's business happening:

The icons in the lists say it too (💸 hold-up · 👛 pickpocket · 🔨 forced door · 🔓 lock · 🚪 guarded door · 🚗 car taken · 💰 loot · 🔑 his car · 🤝 deal · 💼 at work), and so does your own marker — in your words. You only ever see what you could see anyway: a man out of your sight shows nothing, and a line only goes to somebody you can see.

A block is a place, not a dot. Your boss stands somewhere on it — out on the street, at the kerb where the cars are, at the door, or inside — and getting from one to another is a short walk at your own pace, three to five seconds of it. You can watch him do it: he's the gold circle on your block. It isn't decoration — while he's crossing the pavement he is outside, on the block's list, and anyone who can reach that block can reach him. The five seconds at a door begin when he gets to the door, not when you press the button.

Nothing moves him but you. Arrive somewhere and he stays out on the block until you say otherwise — press Enter building and he walks over and goes in; press Get in and he walks to the car. (Auto-enter, if you have it on, starts that same walk for you.)

Travel takes the car if the car is there. With your ride parked on the block — or on a block right next to it — the block's card offers Drive there, and the trip simply begins with the walk to it: he gets in, and the car pulls away. Walk there sits next to it when you'd rather leave the car: on foot the police have no road chase to start, and a man walking draws less than a car pulling away. Arriving is the same in reverse — the car pulls into a free space and he gets out and stands beside it.

Parking, traffic and the tow truck

Cars park off the road. Every block has eight parking spaces, two on each side, on the block's own ground beside the building — never in the street. The middle of each side (where the front door is) and the corners are left clear, and people on foot walk along the edge of the pavement, past the parked cars, never through them. A car pulls out sideways straight onto the road into its lane and drives off; arriving, it drives up level with its space and slides in sideways. A car dealership keeps its sides for the cars it sells, so it only has spaces at the front and back.

A full block asks you. Drive to a block whose eight spaces are all taken and Drive there doesn't just go — the trip card (in the bar at the bottom, beside the log, where it opens by itself) asks, with the time for each answer (the first one is highlighted). Nothing is spent until you pick one:

A car left in the road blocks the traffic. An empty car standing in the road blocks its lane — the direction it faces, not the other one — and everything driving that way queues behind it, a car-length apart: your trip, the residents, the delivery trucks. The car in the road has its hazard lights on. If you're stuck in the queue, your trip card says so, and says when the tow truck should clear it. When the lane frees up, the queue moves off one car at a time, front first.

Traffic jams are something you plan around. When the way you're about to drive runs into a car left in the road that you can see, the trip card asks: go through and wait (with how long you'll be stuck) or take the long way round (with how long that takes) — or don't go. A jam you can't see, you find when you get there.

Then the tow truck comes. A minute after a car is left in the road, a tow truck sets off from the nearest garage, drives up, hooks it and tows it to the pound in its yard. Its driver is a real person — the garage's tow driver by day, one called in from home at night — and the notice names him (Tow driver Sal hooked it up); click the truck and its card shows him: his job, who he works for, his hours, his pay and where he lives. Get back in and drive off before it's hooked and the truck turns round. If it's your car, you’re told where it went and what it costs: $200, plus $25 a block for the distance to the yard, and storage at that garage's bay rent for every day it stays — on day fourteen the pound sells it. Go to that garage — its card says your car is there from anywhere on the map, and the Assets page lists it with Map and Travel — and pay the pound (the fee and the storage): the pound's driver takes it to the nearest free kerb space and parks it there for you (see Tows and the pound). (A wreck waits in the yard: pay, repair it there, then drive it out.) Any car of yours left in the road is towed the same way. Beat the city to it: call your own tow from the phone (Calls › Your cars: standing in the road … yours takes it to a bay) before the city's truck has it on the hook, and that truck takes the car to a bay instead of the pound, for your tow's price — no pound fee, no storage.

You park it at the door. You can't drive into a building — walk inside and your boss gets out and leaves the car on that block, before the five seconds at the door, not after. It stands there at the kerb while you're in there: on the map for anyone who can see the block, and boostable, which is the price of parking outside a job. Coming back out doesn't put you behind the wheel — press Get in (he walks over to it), or just press Drive there on the card of the block you're going to, which takes the car for you.

Your ride is on the map wherever it is. Parked across town, parked at your feet, or with you in it — there's a green car mark on its block, and the tooltip says which: "parked here" or "you're in it". A rival's parked ride shows red on any block you can see.

A wrecked car is not a car. At 10% condition the engine seizes, and you actually get out of it: the wreck stays on the block where it died, you walk on from there, and it stops showing as your ride. Get a mechanic to it, call a tow from your phone to have it hauled to a garage, or torch it and walk away. Beaten all the way to 0%, it's destroyed and can't be recovered at all.

Your key works even when the neighbours are out. A housing block holds many tenants, and a block with nobody home reads as locked to a burglar — but never to somebody who lives there. If you pay rent on it you walk in, whoever else does or doesn't share the building. (Fixed 2026-09-02: only one tenant per block used to get that key, so everyone else was told to break into their own home.)

Rent, arrears and eviction. Rent comes out over time — the cash on you first, then the bank. What you can't cover doesn't vanish — it piles up as arrears, shown on your cash line and the block card, and the next money you have pays it off. One day behind and your landlord sends word — every time you fall behind. Three days behind and you're evicted: the unit goes to someone else, everything in your locker is forfeit, and you're at 🏚 no fixed address until you sign a new lease. Your entry-level job more than covers a starter unit — a full shift pays the day's wage — so an honest civilian life pays its own way — it's living beyond your means that gets you thrown out.

The city is full of tenants — and you can be the landlord. The townspeople live in the city's houses: five or six in a Little Sicily row house, a couple in a greenbelt farmhouse, a handful in each of the skyscraper apartment towers downtown. Each one pays rent to whoever owns the building he lives in — and only the people who really live there pay: a flat nobody lives in pays nothing. Buy a housing block and that rent lands in its safe every day — the quietest income in Rookport: no shelves to stock, no staff to pay, no heat. Count the people before you buy: the house's card, from inside, says how many live there and what they pay. Little Sicily's row houses are nearly full; the Row and the docks are about two-thirds full; the downtown towers have flats for about fifty people each and hold about seven (tuning).

You're protected until your first crime. A brand-new boss who hasn't committed any crime yet can't be attacked by other players — a grace period to find your feet, earn a stake, and learn the ropes. The protection ends the instant you commit your first crime (a shakedown, a fight, a robbery, a pickpocket — anything), and there's no going back: once you've stepped into the underworld, you're fair game. Your status bar shows 🕊️ protected newcomer while it lasts. The game asks before your first crime, every time — this one can't be switched off, and saying yes covers only that one act: if it didn't end your protection, the next crime that could asks again: the sheet says plainly that after it other bosses can attack, rob and kill you for the rest of the round. Some crimes only end it if they go a certain way (a car job that sets the alarm off, a quiet break-in the alarm catches, a shakedown they pay, an ambulance chase you run to a standstill) — the sheet says which.

It's the safe way to build a starting stake — and the honest path if you'd rather run a clean life than a criminal one.

They ring you back. Applying by phone doesn't hire you on the spot: you put an application in and wait for the call, and the better the pay the longer they take about it (tuning) — a dish pit gets back to you in minutes, a bank job keeps you hanging the better part of an hour. When they call, it lands in your 🔔 Alerts and the offer sits on the phone under Applications with Take it or Pass. Leave them waiting too long (about six hours) and the position goes to someone else. You can have several applications out at once; taking one closes the rest.

Buildings & property

Materialize and interact with the building on your tile:

Sell your own production through your shop. If you make goods — cigarettes from a factory, food from a farm, contraband from a lab — a shop you own is where you turn that surplus into money without hauling it to a fence. Put it on the shelf. Stand in your shop, press 🎒 Move things under Honest, and move stock onto the shelf the way you move anything anywhere — same loot panel, no special buttons. From then on it sells itself to the public over time, faster the more prosperous the shop is — and as far as the neighbourhood's money goes — and the money lands in the shop's safe. Anyone who walks in and buys over the counter pays you too. There's no separate "for sale" pile: a shop has one stock, and it's the shelf — which also means a burglar can clean it out, so guard it like anything else. You can stock anything, not just what the place normally sells — put your farm's food on your bar's shelf and it appears on the counter for anyone who walks in, marked as your own stock. They can buy it; they can't sell it back to you at your own price. (That's the slow, hands-off way to sell. The fast way is to carry the bulk yourself to a business that buys it — a restaurant pays more for food than the farm gate — and cash out today. Between the two, a producer has both a standing income and a quick one.)

Set your own prices. Under your counter there's 💲 Your prices: every good on your shelf, what the city charges for it, and a box with your price — anything from half to three times the city's. Press 💾 Set prices (standing in the shop) and it's what everybody pays: anyone who walks in, and the townspeople buying off your shelf over the day. But the public answers the price: they buy as many as usual at the city's price, fewer the dearer you go — none at all at twice it — and up to half as many again if you go cheap. So the city's price takes the most money off the street; a little above it earns you more on stock you paid for; below it clears a full shelf fast. The list tells you how many sell a day at each price, and ↺ The city's prices puts them all back. Visitors see "(the owner's price)" on your counter. What your shop pays a man selling to it, and what trucks pay between businesses, stay the city's. Buy a shop and it sells at the city's prices until you set your own. (tuning)

Working your own shop grows it — it doesn't pay you. You can take the "job" at a business you own and clock in like any worker, but you won't draw a wage (paying yourself out of your own safe is just moving money). Instead, standing behind your own counter grows the place's prosperity fast — several times quicker than leaving it to run itself — which raises everything it earns. And you can't buy from your own shelf — or sell to it: your stock is already yours, so take it off the shelf (or put it on) through the inventory panel rather than "buying" or "selling" it. The same goes for your own fence desk, gear shelf, phone stock and car lot.

Six menus across the top. 🎩 Me (what happened while you were away, your sheet, your loadout, contracts, account) · 🏛 Empire (your holdings and your books) · 👥 Crew (roster, duties, operations) · 🗺 City (the map and the block registry) · 🎭 Underworld (intel, your family, the standings) · 💬 Comms (chat, your burner, the boards). Picking one changes only the middle of the screen — the block you're on stays on the left and everything you can do stays on the right, so you never lose your place to go and read something.

While you were away. The first screen under Contacts. Log in after a day off and it tells you what happened to you while you were gone: who attacked you, what raided your turf, ransom demands, what the law did, your family's news, what your places earned, who messaged you — grouped by kind, newest first, with how long ago each happened (hover it for the exact time). The heading counts what is new since you last opened the page; reading it clears the count on Contacts. Anything against a clock sits on top under Needs you now: a raid on its way to your turf shows its real time left and stays there until it is over, even after you've read it (a crew ringing your place shows Holding the block while it holds); a ransom deal waiting on your answer stays there until you answer it. When a raid is over its line says Landed and drops back into the raids below, without reopening the page. The buttons to defend (Send guards, Call ALL units) are on the red raid strip, in the bar at the bottom of the screen (across the top on a phone). Show me opens the map and moves it to the block a line happened at; a ransom demand or counter, or a message, has Open Chat, which opens your private messages. If the news can't be loaded, the page says so with Try again, and nothing is marked read. With nothing new, the page says you're up to date and shows the last things that happened, already read; with nothing ever, it says what will land here and offers Find a place to own (once you own a place, it says that its takings and anyone who comes for them land here overnight). The same news is in Chat › Alerts, whose Choose which alerts reach you button chooses which kinds reach you and which also go out by email. Your meters and cash are in the bar at the top of the screen, so this page doesn't repeat them; it only tells you the news.

The map remembers. Every block is in one of three states. A block you can see right now is bright and everything on it is current. A block you've been to before shows you what you last saw there — dimmer, and the tooltip tells you how long ago and warns that it may have changed. A block you've never visited shows only what anyone can see from the street: the terrain and the shape of the building. No heat, no owner, no people. The overlays follow the same rule, so an unvisited block is never shaded — the map can't tell you anything you haven't earned.

Three ways to look at the map. Above the board: Plain is the city as it is. Police heat shades the blocks you can see by how much attention the law has on them — green where nobody's watching, deepening red where they are — so you can pick where to work instead of finding out afterwards; a block you only remember shows the heat as you last saw it, and one you've never seen has no reading at all ("heat ?"). Turf shades by who holds each block: gold is yours, red another player, and each AI family its own colour. Turf only shades blocks you can actually see — the map isn't a free intel screen. There's also a search box on the map now: type a building type or a district and jump straight there. (The old colour legend under the board is gone; every dot still explains itself when you hover it.)

A red strip opens in the bar at the bottom when something is inbound (across the top on a phone) — a raid on your turf, a contested pickup — with the buttons to answer it right there in the strip.

Every section folds, and they start folded. Each closed heading tells you how much is inside and how much is locked to you (4 · 2 locked), so you can tell whether it's worth opening without opening it. A block you own carries a lot: the counter, the stat sheet, the shelf, the locks, the traps, your garage, the land, the people standing around. You meet it as a short list of headings — click one to open it, and it stays how you left it next time. On a building card the things you can do come first, in the Honest, Crime and Violent groups (see Every building card reads the same way), and they start open because they're why you're standing there; so do 🚪 Inside building, 🔎 Inspect building and About this place, and the street corner out on open ground. Everything else — the leftovers of Ownership, the locks, the stash, the court's records — folds.

One button moves things. Inside a building, under Honest (captioned Inside building), there's 🎒 Move things — it opens the transfer panel with everything you can reach in it: this room's shelf, till, safe and stash, your pockets, your car's boot, your locker at home. Anything moves between any two of them. Beside it, 💵 Cash opens the same panel straight on the money, for a quick withdraw or deposit. There are no other move buttons anywhere; the lists you see in the room are there to be read.

Plain houses yield no racket income of their own — but if you own a housing block, every tenant in it pays you rent, which is a different and much quieter kind of earner (see below).

What a block costs

A property's price is its payback period — how many days of its own earnings it costs. That period is not the same for every kind of business, and the difference is the whole decision:

KindExamplesPays for itself inWhy
Vicecrack house, casino, dance club, bar12–18 days (the casino the slowest)Fast money, and dangerous money — heat, robbery, raids. Cheap per dollar earned because the dollars come with trouble.
Tradeshops, garages, workshops, dealerships, factories, farms~18 daysOrdinary money at an ordinary price.
Quietwarehouse, office, hotel19–24 days (the hotel the slowest)Earns less and is barely worth robbing. You pay a premium for income nobody comes looking for.

On top of that, where it stands matters: the same bar costs about half as much in the Greenbelt as it does downtown. Cheap ground is where a newcomer starts.

Housing is priced on its rent roll instead — how many units it has, how full they run, and what the district charges — and no house takes more than 20 real days of its rent to pay for itself. That makes a Greenbelt farmhouse (~$2,500) the cheapest roof in Rookport, a Little Sicily row house ~$4,300, a walk-up on the Row ~$12,700, and a downtown tower of about fifty flats ~$82,600 — still the single most expensive thing you can buy. A house you buy fills its flats by the next morning (tuning): the rent comes only from the townspeople who really live there, and at 05:00 people move into your empty flats from the houses nobody owns — while their district's households can afford it (a day and a half of their spending in hand). So a tower you buy holds about fifty people by the next day and brings in about $341.67 a day (a city day; $4,100 over a real day): it pays its price back in about 20 real days. Its rent lands in the house's safe, and the safe holds a week of it: once a week's rent is waiting there, the tenants pay nothing more until you come and collect it (your own cash in the safe doesn't count against that week).

For scale: the dealership's forecourt sells cars from $250 to about $12,000, and its showroom's one top car runs $23,000 to $92,000. So a car is an early purchase, a working business is a mid-game one, and a top car or a downtown tower is the prize of a good third week. Hold what you buy: the gangs come for a place a boss owns near their turf, and an unguarded one falls to the first crew that tries to take it — the downtown towers sit in the Marconi Family's reach. They give a place you've just bought three days before they try to take it (tuning) (they may still rough it up or rob it), and a gang that has hit one of your places leaves that place alone for half a day before it comes back (tuning). Post men on it before then — and a handful of common men won't hold a house on the Marconis' doorstep: it takes a real garrison (about eight men) (tuning).

Prosperity. Every income-earning building carries a prosperity multiplier on its income that climbs the longer it runs undisturbed (up to ×3.0), and gets knocked back when it's robbed or attacked. A business you hold safe for a long stretch earns far more than a fresh one — so protecting your places (and hitting your rivals') matters. Every card shows what a place draws as one figure — up to the base rate times its prosperity, and less when the district's people are short of money — and an unowned place's payback at today's prosperity, with the base rate's beside it. A place nobody owns prospers too, and its asking price stays what it was on the first day: buying a busy one buys its custom. (Numbers are tuning.)

Your staff are real townspeople. A staffable storefront (bar, casino, restaurant, hotel, corner store, gym, dealership, garage, workshop) is run by named employees — people of the city, with homes of their own. They come in when your place opens, stand behind its counter while it's open, and go home at closing (a place that never shuts has its staff split between the days and the nights), so a shut place is empty behind them — and a quiet break-in. You'll see them among the people on the block and walking to and from work, and yes, someone can rob the till past them or even kill your employee (you lose the worker).

Crew

Hire muscle at underworld venues — bars, dance clubs, casinos, gyms, and crack houses — or out in the open in the three parks by day. A man costs what a working man makes: a common recruit asks about $8.33 a day and about nine real days' wages to take on (~$900, plus whatever kit he comes wearing); each tier up costs about 1.6× the one below. A boss keeps at most two men a level (two at level 1, twenty at level 10) — and since you need one man for every place you protect, your crew is also the size of your rackets. Within the cap, the limit is the daily wage bill you can afford. Hiring checks you can pay the fee and still cover a full real day of your whole crew's salary; overreach and you'd miss payroll on the next tick and the crew would walk.

There are no fixed archetypes — every recruit is an individual with their own name and their own rolled stats. What you see at a venue is its line-up: the men out of work who are in the place right now — townspeople looking for a job who walked in through the door, wait about two hours of the city's clock (ten minutes or so, real time) and walk out again (bars, dance clubs, casinos and crack houses by night, gyms by day — nobody waits in a shut place). By day men also wait out in the open in the three parks — Central Park, the pocket woods and the Greenbelt park, 8am–10pm, two to a block: the map marks a park block you can see with the orange corner (and every gym, bar, dance club, casino and crack house you can see carries the same corner, dimmed while the place is shut, and none on a burnt-out one, where nobody waits until it is rebuilt — hover it for its hours and how many men you know are there), walk onto it and the block card lists Men looking for work here, and you hire a man where he stands — the same fee and the same Hire as a gym's. A park man is a Common, level 1 or 2. At 10pm the park empties: the men walk off, and the block card you are standing on says by itself that nobody waits in the park at this hour (the card reads who is there again every 15 seconds, so a man who has walked off is not left on it). The 10-minute wait: a man goes to a line-up only when he can wait there at least 10 minutes (real time) before it closes — the place's last call, 10pm in a park — and before his own bedtime, so you never walk over to a man who is about to leave. The counts: with one in ten of the job market out of work, a new city has about 67 people looking, about half of them men (only men stand in a line-up); in a city day between about 70 and 170 men walk into a line-up, about half of them in a park, and at the busiest about 10 to 25 wait in the parks at once. The Directory has a Park row for each, with how many you see waiting now, and Crew › Your men has a Park › button by day. Each one shows their ⚔ attack, 🛡 defense, ❤ health, a one-time hire fee, and a daily wage — and the fee is set by how good their stats are (better crew cost more). Your first man is cheaper: the first Common you ever take on asks no more than $910 to sign (tuning), and the cash in his pockets on top (his wallet comes back to you), once — the second is charged in full. Hover any stat for a plain-English tooltip. Men come and go through the day, and when few people in town are out of work a line-up is thin or empty — the line-up says so (and whether a man is on his way in). A man looking for work lives his day like anyone else in town: he sleeps at home, goes shopping and goes out, and he drops in to try a line-up as one of his outings — a gym or a park by day, a bar, a dance club, a casino or a crack house by night, at most once by day and once by night, never in his sleeping hours — so the same man does not stand in line-ups all day. A man who finds a job, or is taken on by somebody else, walks out at once — be quick if you like the look of him. Once you hire a man he becomes yours right where he stands and walks over to you; whatever was in his pockets comes to you with him (it was priced into his fee). Where the men are. The Directory's rows say how many men wait at each venue as far as you can see (see City › Directory), and Crew › Your men puts the kinds of place open now first (a shut kind is dimmed and says when it opens), with a Men waiting now line for the places you know have men in, each with Travel. A Where to hire button anywhere opens the Directory on the kind of place hiring now: the gyms by day, the bars by night. When you hire a man the log says what he cost and what his wallet held, to the cent, and the count of men waiting where you hired him drops by one at once. You don't have to be standing there to look: click any recruit venue on the map and the viewer previews who is in its line-up now — portraits, tiers, attack/defense and hire fees — so you can spot a venue worth the trip, then tap a face to route straight over (you still hire once you're on the block).

Quality tiers & portraits. Every recruit and crew member has a quality tier — Common, Rare, Epic, or Legendary (shown as a coloured badge). The tier sets how strong they are as a share of your own stat budget at their level: a Common is built to about 70% of what a player has at that level, a Rare ~85%, an Epic ~100% (a match for you), and a Legendary ~120% (sharper than you). It also drives how rare they are to find (Legendary are extremely rare — now and then a legendary man walks into a gym's or a casino's line-up) and their hire fee and daily wage. Their points always land as a sensible fighter's spread — a solid base across Strength, Accuracy and Speed, with the odd one specialising (a real bruiser, or a sharp negotiator) — never dumped into a single useless stat. Gear stacks on top of all this. Classier venues turn up rarer crew — a back-alley crack house is mostly Common street muscle, while the casino and gym draw the sharper, tougher set. Each place holds just one or two men at a time, so shopping around venues matters — and the first man in any line-up is always somebody you can actually hire: a level-1 Common who'll work for a nobody, so a brand-new boss is never locked out of hiring anyone anywhere. Each tier has its own hand-drawn portrait that evolves across the ten levels, getting visibly richer and more dangerous as it rises.

Who you can command. One gate: you can't recruit anyone above your own level. Their card shows their level next to yours, so you always know. That's the whole rule — the tiers gate themselves through money, since a Legendary's fee and daily wage are several times a Common's, and rarer tiers turn up at higher levels anyway. Level up and the room opens up.

Recruits are full characters. Every recruit carries the same four primary stats you do (Strength, Accuracy, Speed, Intelligence), shown on their card, and those four primaries drive their fighting numbers exactly the way yours drive yours — a high-Strength goon hits harder and carries more health, a high-Speed one dodges and soaks better, and their weapon and skills factor in on top. So a crew member is a genuine fighter, not a flat stat line, and the ⚔/🛡 you see on their card is the real power they bring. Their card also shows your boss's level next to theirs, so you can see at a glance whether you're allowed to hire them.

They come equipped. Higher-tier, higher-level recruits arrive already wearing gear and carrying some pocket cash — and the hire fee prices all of it in (the cash in full: Leadership lowers his price, never what's in his pockets). So there's no free lunch in buying someone and stripping them: you paid for the kit (which you can take back to your stash) and you pocket their cash when you hire them. Their card shows exactly what they carry before you commit.

Some recruits are veterans who've already leveled up, arriving with higher primaries and level for their tier. Combat contribution: a crew member's attack adds to yours when you strike and their defense soaks damage when you're hit (escorting crew only — garrisoned crew hold their block instead) — all derived from their own four primaries plus their gear and skills, so who you hire genuinely shapes how they fight. Crew are fighters in their own right: many come with their own combat skills (Killer, Tough-as-nails, Heavy weapon), shown on their card, that raise the damage they add and soak — better-tier, higher-level recruits come better trained, and promoting a crew member sharpens their skills too.

Your bodyguards take the hits for you — and they go down first, wounded, not dead. In any fight, incoming damage lands on your escorting bodyguards before it reaches you — they have to be cut down before an enemy can touch you (which is why bodyguards are worth their wage). A crew member who's beaten down is out of action: they can't fight or shield you and stop adding attack/defense until they heal back over time on the world-tick, just like you do — or you have him treated at a hospital (see Walk into a hospital on your feet under The hospital). A man who comes out of a fight hurt but still standing doesn't heal by himself: a hospital is the only way back to full. No blow kills them, and nobody but a boss finishes them: a man knocked down lies wounded where he fell, and heals where he is at the hospital's rate. The only way to lose him in a fight is a rival boss who was in that fight finishing him — on the block where he fell, while he still lies there, within the hour; then he's gone from your roster for good, and you're told who did it. Your team stands in front of you. A man of yours who joins your fight goes into the line just ahead of you, and a man who reaches your side while you're in a stand-up fight steps into it in front of you ("Vito reaches Sal and steps in front of him"): the fight card says whose blows land first (their blows land on Vito first). A wounded escort is off the board until he recovers. Your crew panel shows who's recovering and your escort's current fighting bonus reflects only the crew fit to fight.

Your men go everywhere the way you do — from where they are. A man at your side walks a step beside you, or sits in your car. Every order you give him — come back to you, guard a block, work a place, deal on a corner, train at the gym, spy, go to hospital, go on a raid — is a trip that starts where he stands: he walks, running the first blocks when it's urgent, or drives when a car he can use gets him there sooner — the car you gave him, one of your cars nobody has, a seat in a car going his way, a car of his own — and he takes whichever is quicker: the fastest way they have, always. A hurt man walks slower and can't run — and a man knocked out never walks: he goes only in a car with a man on his feet at the wheel (yours counts, with you driving), or in the ambulance; with neither he lies where he is (see Your crew, the same way, under the hospital). His card says where he's going and when he'll be there (On his way to you · about 4 min), his dot moves on the map, and he starts the job only when he arrives: a guard counts on his block, a dealer sells, a spy's hours run, from the moment he gets there. A man still on his way is not in your fight — your bodyguards fight only beside you — and nobody can jump or rob him on the road (for now). Seats count. Your car seats so many; when you drive off with more bodyguards than seats, the rest follow on foot (or in his own car, if a man has one on the block) and catch up with you when you stop. While you're held — arrested, in jail, or somebody's prisoner — the men you post stay at their posts and keep working, and your bodyguards go to your home, else your hideout, else the nearest building you own, and wait there (they defend only a building that is yours, and a family stronghold takes no more than its guard places); with nowhere to go they wait where they are. A man you let go walks off (one out cold can't: he leaves your crew where he lies, and the next passer-by calls him an ambulance) home to his own district and becomes one of the townspeople there, broke; a man the gangs or the Syndicate take on walks up off the street.

Duties — assign each crew member a job:

Manual promotion. Crew earn XP two ways: bodyguards bank extra from your fights, and every crew member gains XP over time for whatever duty you've put them on — a guard watching a block, a worker running a still, a dealer working a corner all get better at the job just by doing it (rates are tuning). When one has banked enough, you can promote them for a cash tribute — raising their level, lifting their daily wage, and advancing their portrait to the next look in their tier. You assign every point they earn — a promotion banks both a stat point (a +STR / +ACC / +SPD / +INT picker) and a skill point (pick a skill) on their card, and you decide where each goes. Nothing auto-assigns. That's why hiring a level-1 recruit is the most valuable: you shape their entire build from scratch. A veteran you hire already-leveled just arrives with those earlier levels pre-spent (their backstory) — you build them only from where you found them.

How fast points come depends on their tier, so they hold their share of a player at every level: a Legendary earns about 1.2 of each point per promotion (most levels, occasionally two at once), an Epic exactly one, and a Common about 0.7 — roughly a point every one-and-a-half levels, banking the leftover toward the next. Their card shows the rate and how many levels until the next point.

Crew skills. Skill points go into the same skills you train, limited to the ones that actually help a crew member. A crew member's skill mirrors what it does for you, minus the part that can't apply to a subordinate. So far that's: Killer, Tough-as-nails and Heavy weapon (their fighting); Dealer and Relation, which — with Intelligence — lift a crew member's take on dealer duty (the same trade-edge you get on your own buys and sells); and three more:

Every crew skill now has a real effect. You choose who to invest in and always assign the points yourself — and you can also park crew at a gym to level them up hands-free over time (see "Train crew at a gym" below).

Give your workers an escort. A crew member working out on the map — a dealer on a corner, a guard on a block (and soon a spy on enemy turf) — can be handed an escort of your other crew plus a car, right on their card (his escort). Pick free bodyguards to protect them and give his escort one of your cars (its best driver takes the wheel). The escort means: they're far harder to rob, bust or hurt while working; when trouble does come, a bodyguard takes the fall (wounded, never killed) instead of the worker; the best driver aboard speeds them (and their car) around; and the whole team carries much more — each bodyguard adds carrying capacity and the car's trunk stacks on top, so a guarded dealer holds a far bigger working stock between refills. Disband the detail any time and everyone returns to your side (the car stays where the team left it, nobody's). It costs you nothing extra beyond the crew's usual wages — but those bodyguards are off escorting you while they're on the detail, so you're a little thinner at your own side.

The crew board: drag and drop. Crew › Your men is a board you arrange by hand. At the top are you (drop a team or a man on you and they come to you), Everyone, Call all crew and the Defend me when I'm down switch. Then come your teams, each card with its men and its car, a New team spot, On their own (the men in no team), your places (the block you're on, the block you picked on the map, your home, hideout and buildings, the prison gate, a police car taking one of yours, your men on their posts, a hospital when someone is hurt, the garages near you, your family's jobs) and your cars.

Launch an operation — who, where, what. Every crew job launches the same way, from the Launch an operation panel on Crew › Your men (beside the board, or its folding bar on a phone), or by a drop on the board. Pick who goes (one of your teams, a man on his own, or Everyone), then where (you; the block you're on; the block you picked on the map; your home, your hideout or a building of yours; the prison gate; the police car taking you or one of your men; one of your cars; one of your men on his post; a hospital when one of them is hurt), then what: only the jobs that make sense there. A job that can never happen there isn't shown (no Watch and no raid at your own place, where you work, on your family's ground or on open ground); a job you can't do right now is greyed with the reason (a recorded payphone, too few actions, no phone, the back of a police car, you're down, a car errand that is one man's). Before you launch, the cost line says what it costs (free, or actions: a Redeploy or a raid by the distance, 12 to watch a place, 6 to leave a car across the road), whether it goes in person or by phone, who goes and who stays behind and why (a man in a hospital bed, held, away), and the team's car. A team goes whole, and there is no limit of five: the car seats decide who rides, the rest walk, each by his quickest way, and the job lands with the last of them. To send only some of a team, Split… it first: the men you pick become a new team, and nobody moves. The men at your side who are in no team are made a team in one tap. A man on his own is a team of one: on an order of his own (with you, a post, dealing, watching, waiting, lying low) he leaves his team, and the cost line says so; on a Redeploy or a raid, protecting a man, a car errand, the gate, the hospital or the gym he stays in it. A team's raid: with the whole team at your side, the raid planner opens with the team, the block and the job filled in; untick a man and only the men ticked go, as themselves, not as the team. A team that isn't all at your side goes by phone: it gathers where it stands (at its car's block, else where its first man is), then goes. Guard it (Redeploy) for men who aren't all at your side goes by phone the same way, and with no phone it's greyed. A team that digs in (a Redeploy, a raid won) puts its first man on guard and the others protecting him: at a place of yours that post becomes the team's order (Back to the team's order sends them there again); at a block that isn't yours they hold it, the team's order stays as it was, and you're told. Protect him: send a team, or a man at your side, to one of your men on his post and they land as his escort, even while he's down. Leave it across the road: the man you pick brings the car. On the Teams card, Launch… opens this card with the team picked, and Split… splits it. Garages are places too: the three nearest garages when you have a car, and any garage or car dealership you pick on the map or stand on. There a man alone can Put a car in a bay (a garage only; the cost line says the bay's rent a day) or Sell a car here (a garage, or a dealership for a car that is not hot; the cost line says about what it fetches, and he brings the cash back to you dirty). Which car picks the car, his own first; a car of another man's is greyed (pick him, or give it to this man first). A team is greyed there, since one man drives it. A car your crew have out on a job can't be sent on an errand till the job is over, and a man who can't drive is greyed with why: a hurt man can ride but not drive, and a man in the law's hands, away on a job, spying or on an escort can't go. Family jobs are places too: each raid your family has in the air, with Join it for a team or a man at your side, greyed when they are not all at your side, when you have already sent men to it, or with too few actions. Before they go, the ask-first box shows the men you send and their real strength (attack and defence), who could call the police (nobody: a crew raid makes no police call), and, the first time, that joining a raid ends your newcomer protection. Send crew on a building of yours (Empire › What you own), Op or Send crew in the Directory, and the viewer's Op open this card with that block as the place: pick who goes, then the job.

Teams you name yourself. On Crew › Your men, the Teams card puts your men in teams that last: New team with… makes a team from a man, then you name it, add men and give it one of your cars. A man is in one team at a time, and a team has one car: a car your crew have out on the road is given to a team only once it is back. A man who joins a team with a car leaves his own car where it stands, and the team's best driver takes the wheel (if he leaves the team, the next best driver does). Making or changing a team moves nobody: the men wait for the team's order. One launch moves the whole team — with you, guard, work, deal or watch a block, wait at a block, or lie low in your hideout — and they go together, in the team's car when riding is quicker (nobody outside the team takes it). On a post, the team's first man holds it and the others protect him as his escort. On a guard post, every man of a team guarding a place counts as its guard: when the place is attacked they all defend it, their crew cards say holding this block, and the best Spying among them spots spies and the best Security technician among them rigs its traps, as a guard's does. If the police stop the first man on his way, the others still arrive as his escort and wait for him there. If the order is refused (a family stronghold without a bunk for every man of the team, a work post at a place that makes nothing), it says why and nobody moves. A man you can't reach (inside, stopped by the police, away on a job, in a hospital bed) stays where he is and stays in the team. Back to the team's order sends them again after a Call all or a rescue split them up. An order for a block you're not on goes by phone — and by phone a guard or work post is only at a building of yours, your home or your hideout; guarding someone else's block you're not on is a Redeploy, planned like a raid. From your cell, Give an order by phone… on the jail card opens Launch an operation: pick the team as who goes, and it is one order for the whole team, counted once on the call. Giving one man an order of his own takes him out of his team; a hospital bed or the gym doesn't. A team ends when its last man leaves, and its car stays where it stands.

Send a spy onto enemy turf. Any crew member can be sent to spy on a tile you don't own — except one who is protecting another man (call him back as a Bodyguard first), one who is hurt or away on a raid, or one still resting from his last job. Select the enemy block on the map, then press Spy under His duty on the crew member's card; it costs 12 actions. They travel there — on foot or in a car, from wherever they are, with their escort if they have one — and once there relay that building's live intel back to you in real time — its defense, how many guards, its till cash, stored goods and what it's producing — right on their crew card. A spy comes back to you 22 hours after he gets there (if you gave him an escort, he and his bodyguards come back together, in the escort's car — a safe ride home), then rests 2 hours after he's due back before he can go out again. Detection is absolute: your spy is invisible unless the tile's owner — or one of their guards — has a higher Spying skill than your spy, so the higher your spy's Spying, the fewer can spot him (and a high-level guard on your own turf is how you catch theirs). A detected spy is exposed and can be jumped — which is exactly when the escort earns its keep, taking the hit so your spy limps home instead of being lost. Build a crew member's Spying skill to make them a better, harder-to-catch spy.

Rig traps on your turf (Security technician). If you — or a guard you've stationed on a block you own — carries the Security technician skill, you can rig traps on that building's card, and they defend it against a raiding crew op. Different traps do different things: a spring-gun charge hits the raiders for damage, a tripwire alarm braces your guards (a stiffer counter-attack) and sends you a louder warning, and barricades & caltrops bog the raiders down and blunt their attack — with more kinds to come. Detection is absolute, like a spy: an attacking crew only spots and disarms a trap if their own Security-tech is higher than the trap's level, so the higher the trap's level, the fewer raiders can beat it (and the trap's level is set by the Security-tech of whoever rigged it — build it high on a guard and your turf becomes a fortress). And disarming takes time: while the raiders work the wires, a garrison that can still shoot keeps firing on them, so a higher-level trap they can beat still bleeds them — traps and stationed guards are far nastier together than either alone. Seize a block and you clear the old owner's traps with it.

Salaries are paid every tick from your cash (dirty first). Keep the money flowing or the crew walks.

Burn a rival's building down (Arsonist). Bring a crew member with the Arsonist skill on an Attack or Rob op and they'll torch the building as they go through — real structural damage (more the higher their Arsonist level). Every building has a structure bar (shown on its block card): a fire-damaged place earns less and defends worse until it's fixed, and at zero it's gutted. It's the way to grind a rival's turf down instead of just skimming it — soften a fortified block over a couple of raids, then move in. Arson is only set on Attack and Rob, never on a Capture (you want the place standing when you take it). If it's your building that got torched, Repair it back to full on its block card for cash — the sooner the better, since it's bleeding income while it burns.

Razed to the ground. A Destroy op that drives a structure to zero doesn't just gut it — it levels the place. A razed building is a smoking ruin (its block card shows a 💥 RAZED banner): it earns nothing, produces nothing, its shelves stay empty, its staff are gone — and every upgrade, trap and camera it had is lost in the blast. NPC businesses rebuild themselves in about a day (police stations, hospitals and the like faster — the city looks after its own), and the AI gangs patch their sites up too. But a player's ruin never comes back on its own: the owner has to stand on it and pay to 🏗️ Rebuild (clean cash, scaled to the building's size) — and then buy back every upgrade from scratch. Leveling a rival's fortified hideout is the most lasting blow you can land on their operation.

Train crew at a gym. Stand at a gym and a free crew member's card offers Train here — or step inside and the gym's own card has Leave a man here to train: pick one of your men (a hurt man can't) and press Train him here. Park them there and they work out and level up on their own over time, no fights and no promotion fee needed. It's slow, and the levels they earn still bank their stat and skill points for you to assign (you always choose the build), so it's the patient, hands-off way to raise a recruit while you're busy elsewhere. The catch is they're exposed while training: a rival can send an Attack op at the gym to jump your trainees. If that happens, the crew member being hit and every other crew member you have training at that same gym fight back together as a group. Gyms are shared ground — you might find a rival training right next to you, and it's up to each of you whether to leave it be or start something. Pull a trainee off any time by giving them another duty on their card (Bodyguard, Guard here, etc.).

Street crooks — the pickpockets

Some of the people out of work work the street instead. A few of the city's townspeople looking for work (at most one in thirty of them) are pickpockets, men and women. Each part of the day a pickpocket goes out to the busiest block near his home (a park, a shopping street, the pavements outside the nightlife) and works the crowd for an hour or two of the city's clock (never under ten real minutes; moved off a block, he works the next crowd inside the same time, never longer); one part of the day in three he tries a line-up instead, like any man looking for work. He never works a block with a cop on it or next to it, and he moves off when one comes near. On his block his card says Now: working the crowd.

He can try your pocket too. Standing on foot out on his block, a pickpocket may try you, at most once a real day, whether you are at the screen or away: it takes 15% of the cash on you, at most $80, never the bank, and your feed says so (Your pocket's lighter: $40. Vinnie, working the Central Park crowd, went off toward (15,10).). Bodyguards at your side make him think twice. A new boss who has never broken the law is never a mark. While he still carries it, a Pickpocket, Rob or Attack on him gets it back.

You catch his hand in your coat. When a try on you goes wrong while you are at the screen, he is held where he stands for 20 seconds and a card opens in the bar at the bottom of the screen with three answers:

You answer from his block. The card closes on its own if you walk off, if he is knocked down or a fight starts on him, or if a cop comes onto the block (the cop takes him in, and you can't rough him up in front of the law).

Offer him work, any time. Every street crook's person card has Hire him (his price on the tile): get beside him on his block and take him on, the same price and the same gates. A crook you robbed, beat or roughed up won't take it for a real week.

The law on the street. Nobody calls the police over a wallet. But a cop who is on the block when a pickpocket makes his try sees it and takes him in: cuffed where he stands, the nearest free patrol car comes for him, the ride, a cell (20 minutes for picking pockets, real time), then out at the prison gate and home. No officer is called in from home for a pickpocket: with no car free he waits in cuffs. A cop on the next block sees nothing. A pickpocket lying hurt is never taken in: the officer leaves him to the ambulance. Taken in twice in a week, he gives up the street.

Operations — send a crew raid

You don't have to be standing on a tile to hit it. From the Crew panel you can send your crew — as many as you pick, and a team goes whole — to any tile as a timed operation. They set off together: the cars you send seat as many as they can, the rest walk, each by his quickest way, and the job lands with the last of them; and you can watch them go: the live Operations tracker in the left column says whether they're walking or driving, where they are now (Show centres the map on them) and when they'll get there, worked out from the real streets. When the last man reaches the target the raid plays out as a real fight over several turns — no more instant result — trading blows a beat at a time until it's decided, then the op reports the outcome. You stay put and keep acting while they're away — but the crew you send are off escorting you until they get back, so you're less protected in the meantime.

Crew › Plan a raid walks you through it in seven steps, in the order the decisions actually happen: 1 who goes · 2 the target (the block you picked on the map; Change takes you back to the map, and the team you picked is still picked when you come back) · 3 the job · 4 how they go in · 5 the way there · 6 what you know about the place · 7 check & send. Each step shows its answer on its own line with a tick once it's settled, so a planned raid reads back as one line per decision. A job the block can't take is left out or greyed with the reason (nothing hostile on your own place, your family's ground or where you work; no Rob at a police station, prison, hospital, courthouse or court, at your own home or at a place you run protection on), and the job you picked comes back when you pick a block that takes it. In Who goes a team is one pick, and it goes whole: its fit men are ticked for you. A team whose men are not all at your side is greyed with why: send it from Launch an operation instead (it goes by phone, gathering where it stands), or Split… off the men with you. Or tick the men one by one: they go as themselves. Under the teams, Who goes lists every man you have: the ones free to go have a tick box with their attack, defence and health; the ones who can't go are greyed with the reason (posted as a guard, hurt, out on a job, walking home), and a posted man has a Change duty link to Your men. Check & send spells the whole decision out before anything is spent: what you get, what it costs (the actions, before and after, and how many bodyguards stay with you), the odds (there are none: a real fight settles it, so it shows what you send against what you last saw there), the heat, who could call the police (nobody: a crew raid makes no police call) and what happens if it goes wrong. If the raid can't go, it says why, with a link to the fix. A violent job then asks you once more, and your first one says it ends your newcomer protection. Lending your car costs a seat: somebody has to drive it, so a four-seat car means four men on the block, the driver included, and the planner marks who drives: the man with the best Driving, because he sets the car's speed. If your car is parked somewhere else or already out on another job, its box is greyed with that reason. With no crew yet, the screen says what a raid is for and has buttons to Your men and to the Directory's bars.

Choose who goes, pick the target tile by tapping it on the map (the launcher targets your currently selected tile), pick the op type, and launch. Mounting an op costs you actions scaled to the distance. Only crew on bodyguard duty, at your side and fit to fight can go — garrisoned, working, dealing, wounded, already-deployed crew, or a man still on his way to you, can't. Cars for the op lists your ride (if it's with you) and every car of yours on your block or the next that can drive: tick the ones to send. They drive, so the run arrives faster, a Rob hauls more (overflowing into the trunks), the cars carry more crew (the seats decide who rides, never how many go: the rest walk), and the crew fight from behind their armor on the raid — the defenders' return fire is blunted, scaled to the cars' size. Each car is driven by its own man if he goes, else by the best driver left. A car on the next block comes round to your block first, and then the convoy leaves together, at the pace of its slowest car as driven. A car nobody took is dropped from the op, and if everyone comes back hurt the car stays where they left it — you're told, with Bring it to me. A car can only be out on one op at a time.

The operations you can run:

How they mean to fight — the engagement. An Attack now asks how, not just where:

Take the back streets. Pick it on any job and the crew route around the patrols instead of straight through: the run takes about 40% longer. On an Attack or a Rob, the job then draws only about a third of the heat and police attention when it goes down. A Capture, a Destroy or a Massacre is as loud whichever way they go, and a Scout or a Redeploy makes no heat either way; the planner's two choices say which applies to the job you picked.

Know before you go. The launcher tells you what you actually know about the target — live intel if you have eyes on it, your last-known picture with its age if you don't, or a flat warning that you've never scouted it. If the numbers are too old to bet men on, send a Scout first (see "Vision & intel"): when he gets back, his picture of the place is what the launcher shows.

The family fights together — and you can see who's already in. If you're in a clan, the launcher also carries the ops centre: every family job in the air, and for each one the men who have answered it by name, how many crew each sent, and when theirs land. Pick your men in step 1 (Who goes) and hit Send to reinforce a made man's job (the row shows what it costs in actions from where you stand, and every man you tick goes): your detachment travels from where you are, and if it arrives while the fight is still on, it joins the attack mid-fight. If the fighting is already over, they dig in and hold the block instead. Once you're in, the card says so instead of offering to send you twice — and a job nobody has answered yet says that plainly, which is the whole point: a bare count of allies is how two capos both assume the third man has it covered and nobody sends anyone. Launch an operation has every family job as a place too (see below).

Your crew don't hit your own side. On your family's ground, or at the place you work, the planner offers only Redeploy and Scout. A crew storming a block leaves your family — and a family you've signed a treaty with — standing there alone. A crew doesn't rob a police station, the prison, the hospital or the courthouse. And a raid that wins at a rival family's stronghold breaks its defense: for half an hour after, you and your family can break in (the door and the safe still need picking) — the raid's report says so.

The detachment's strength is the attack and gear of the crew you send, weighed against the target's defenses — so send enough muscle. Whoever loses the exchange takes wounds and deaths of their own (the same crew-combat rules as any fight). Survivors then make their way back to you from where they stand — on foot (a hurt man slower), or in the cars they took, which they park near you — following you if you've moved on, and while they're returning they're not at your side: they can't escort you, hold a block, or be sent out again until they reach you, and the Operations tracker shows how many crew are heading back and when they'll be with you. (If you're arrested or held meanwhile, they go to your place instead.) (The exceptions are a won Capture or a Redeploy — those crew hold the ground they took instead of coming home.) So sending crew on a long op leaves you thinner for a while. An op is loud — it raises your heat and the target block's police presence.

Your turf fights back — garrison auto-defense. The flip side: when a rival sends an op at a building you hold, the guards you've stationed there defend it automatically — they bring their own attack to bear on the raiders (on top of the building's defense bonus), so a well-garrisoned block is genuinely hard to crack, and your guards can hospitalise attackers just as they can be hospitalised. Whatever the outcome, a defense report lands in your left-hand panel — telling you who hit which building, whether your garrison held, and what your guards or your property lost — so you find out even if you were offline when it happened. Dismiss the reports once you've read them. Stationing crew as guards on your earners (the "guard here" duty) is now real protection, not just a defense-stat bump.

And now you see it coming. When a hostile crew op is on its way to a building you own, a live ⚠️ Raid inbound alert appears in your left panel — who's attacking, which block, how many raiders, and a countdown to impact. One tap on Send guards redeploys every free man at your side to that block (or Pick crew opens the operation panel on that building: pick the team and the job). If they land before the raid, they're stationed in time to reinforce the garrison — a fatter defense at resolve. And since raids play out over several turns, crew who land while the fight is already raging rush straight into it — they join the defenders' line mid-fight (in front of the building itself), so even a late rally can turn the tide. You get the warning because it's your own turf; you don't have to be standing on it.

Call in everyone — the emergency rally. When "Send guards" (the free men at your side) isn't enough, hit 🚨 Call ALL units on the raid alert — or 🚨 Rally all crew here on any block you own — and you phone every crew member you can reach and send them all to that block: guards pulled off other blocks, dealers off their corners, crew training at a gym, your escort, everyone. They come from where they are, by the quickest way they have — on foot, or in a car of yours they can use — the nearest first. A man still on his way is not in your fight. Each one's dot moves on the map and the phone says when each is due — and whoever beats the raid's countdown garrisons the building and stands in the defense, while those farther out straggle in behind it. It's a real scramble: crew already away on an op, walking home from one, or in the hospital can't answer, and everyone who does answer drops what they were doing (a dealing corner goes quiet, a training grind pauses, another block loses its guard) — so it's the button you mash when a block truly matters, not a routine move. You need a phone to make the call.

The AI gangs raid too (in a round that has them). The four rival gangs don't just buy turf — they send their own crews out on the same raids you can, hitting buildings you (or a rival gang) own near their territory. So the threat is real even before another human comes after you: hold property near a gang's turf and you may get a defense report saying their crew tried to rob or seize it. Your garrison defends against them exactly as it would against a player. The gangs leave the newbie-safe blocks around the spawn alone, so a brand-new player's first place is safe.

And they hold grudges. Hit a gang's turf and expect an answer: a raided gang muscles up, re-garrisons the block you struck — and sends a revenge crew at YOUR nearest holding, reaching further than their ordinary raids. (Gangs avenge each other's raids too, so gang-vs-gang wars flare up on their own.) Their soldiers now come armed off the same gear tables your crew uses — pistols, kit, their own combat skills — so gang muscle hits noticeably harder than it used to. And their rackets actually run: a gang still or drug lab gets a street dealer stationed on the tile, pulling the product and selling it for the gang's war chest — find the dealer, hit the site before it's sold out, or cut the racket down entirely.

Gear & equipment

Wearable gear modifies combat across six slots — head, chest, vest, legs, melee weapon, gun. You carry two weapons: a club or a blade in the melee slot and a gun in the gun slot, one of each. Buy at the relevant shop — the stock shows up right in the On this block panel while you're standing there — loot it off defeated marks, keep it in your stash, then equip it or hand it to a crew member from Boss › Gear & money. That screen shows the six slots (each with what it adds; an empty one says what it means, the cheapest piece a shop sells for it (or Put on, if a spare piece fits), and a Where to buy button that opens the Directory on it), which of your two weapons hits harder, your phone, your spare gear with Put on and Give to…, what you carry against both limits, where every dollar you own is (the bank, the cash on you, and anything put away), and what a rival could take if you went down. Taking a piece off, putting one on and handing one over are free. You can also take a crew member's gear back to your stash or move it between them — each equipped piece has a take button on the crew panel — so you can kit out whoever's riding with you. Catalog (tuning):

ItemSlotBonusPriceSold at
Flat caphead+1 def$80convenience store
Steel helmethead+3 def$400gun shop
Leather jacketchest+2 def$200convenience store
Work pantslegs+1 def$60convenience store
Kevlar vestvest+6 def$1,200gun shop
Baseball batmelee weapon+2 atk$150convenience store
Trench knifemelee weapon+5 atk$900gun shop
Pistolgun+3 atk$500gun shop
SMGgun+7 atk$1,500gun shop

A weapon is the single biggest early-game upgrade — it makes robbing unarmed marks far safer. The gear screen tells you which of your two hits harder, and so how you'll fight: hold your distance and shoot, or shoot as you charge in and finish it with the blade. How frightening you look (a hold-up, a shakedown) counts your better weapon, not both.

Every piece of gear moves by drag as well as by its button. In the loot panel, the trade table and the family's stores (its armory, its vault, its cars), pick a row up by its ⠿ grip and drop it on the other side: the drop presses that row's own button — with the amount you typed — so it does exactly what the button does, and the button stays. A side that can't take it doesn't light up, and says why.

A man has to be there to take a piece. A man at your side or on your block gets it at once. A man across town walks over to collect it, then goes back to his spot and his job — on foot, in his own car, or in the car he came in (never another car of yours parked by you). The piece stays yours, and locked, till he gets to you; the log and the alert say "Sal walks over to you for the Flat cap (about 2 min)". Taking a piece back from him works the same way, the other way round. It's called off — and the piece stays where it was — by a new order to him, by his arrest or yours, or if the piece is moved meanwhile; if you're down when he arrives, nothing changes hands and he goes back. A man who is dealing, spying, escorting, training, in a bed, hurt or on a job isn't sent on an errand: go to him, or call him off first. And nothing passes to or from your men while you're in the law's hands — nor goes on you or comes off you: in the police car, in a cell or held captive, your own gear stays as it is till you're out. On the crew board (Crew › Your men) every piece is a chip you drag between you, a man, your spare gear, a car's boot and the family's store; a boot you're not by, you walk to first.

A boot carries gear, by its litres. A gun, a club or a blade takes 6 L, a Kevlar vest 12 L, anything else (a cap, a jacket, work pants) 3 L; a piece that doesn't fit is refused with the litres left. Every car of yours parked on your block, in a space or at the kerb, opens as a boot in the loot panel's picker; Empire › What you own shows what's in your ride's boot, gear and its litres included, and Open the boot opens the loot panel on it (the old Load / Take buttons are gone — the panel does it). A car with gear in its boot can't be sold or exported — Sell it… tells you at once which piece is in there; take it out first (open its boot where it stands). If the pound sells the car, or it's scrapped or torched, the gear in its boot goes with it, and the notice names it.

The police look in the boot. At a road stop the police look in the boot of the stopped car together with the man in it — one search, one find, one fine out of the cash on him (a boot's cash is never fined). An arrest in your car seizes from its boot under the arrest's own rule — every weapon, a share of the illegal goods; a car of yours parked somewhere else isn't touched. A Cold boss is still never pulled over.

Combat

You can attack NPCs (civilians, shopkeepers, gangsters, police, SWAT) and rival players — tap their row in the left panel, or click their dot right on the map: either way their person card opens in the viewer. It reads top to bottom: who they are (portrait, name, a coloured tag — Local, Police, Gangster, Rival boss, Family — and one plain sentence), how far they stand against how far your weapon reaches, what you know about them and how you know it (what they wear, what they're doing, their day — never what's in their pockets), what they are to you (a stranger, your staff, the family's staff, someone who works where your day job is, a friend, an enemy, a pending offer), then every move you can make, grouped like the building card: Honest · no heat (track, mark an enemy, friendship, message, trade), Crime · raises heat (pickpocket) and Violent · can start a fight (rob, attack, finish). Each move shows its cost in actions and who would call the police; a move you can't make right now stays in its group, greyed, with the reason and a link to the fix. Nothing hostile is drawn against your own staff, the family's staff, the people who work where your day job is, a clanmate or a clanmate's posted man. Pickpocket and Rob show your odds as a number and a word: the chance the lift comes off (your Stealth against his defence) and the chance he folds. The numbers — level, attack, defence, health — sit at the bottom, each with what it means. Roughly (tuning):

A weapon reaches so far — measured from where you stand to where they stand. Fists, a bat or a knife: 3 m. A pistol: 25 m. An SMG: 35 m. The card says how far they are, how far what you hold reaches, and whether that's enough (18 m away · your pistol reaches 25 m · in reach). A gun reaches across a street: somebody on the facing pavement is about 17 m away, so a pistol can open up on them from your side — the Attack button stays live on a block you're only watching when your weapon reaches (everything else there still means walking over). Out of reach on your own block, pressing Attack walks you in until you are — a fist steps right up, a pistol stops at twenty-odd metres. A fist across a street means crossing it first. Walls stop bullets: someone who ducked into a shop is out of reach from the pavement (you walk in after them) — unless they hold the building (it's theirs, their family's, or their guards are posted on it): a dug-in garrison shoots out of its windows, and you can shoot back at its windows from the street.

Every fight — a rival boss, a street NPC, a recruit brawl — plays out as a multi-round engagement: a blow-by-blow exchange shown round by round, not one swing. Street marks can bolt mid-fight when they're hurt (a beaten recruit who flees leaves the venue's line-up), and any fight can end with you in the hospital. Each weapon hits with its own power: a gun (Pistol, SMG) off your Accuracy, a melee weapon (Baseball bat from a corner store, Trench knife from a gun shop) or bare fists off your Strength.

The fight picks the weapon by range, every turn, for everybody in it. Beyond arm's length (3 m) you shoot, if your gun reaches. If your melee weapon hits harder, you charge: you fire as you run in, and once you're on him you use the blade. At arm's length a gun fires only every other turn, so up close you use whichever does more. In a car chase it's guns only. The fight card says what each of you is using, and the log names it ("hit Joe for 21 (pistol, trench knife)"). Only the weapons you actually used take wear.

Win and you can loot the loser's cash (dirty), phone, and gear, and you earn XP scaled to how hard the fight was — a tooled-up gangster or SWAT trooper is worth far more than a soft civilian. Nobody dies in a fight unless a boss finishes him. Whoever loses lies hurt where he fell — the townsperson, the officer, the gangster, your man or a rival's — and no NPC and no crewman ever finishes anybody, yours included. The next person who comes by and sees him calls the ambulance (never one of the side that beat him); his card says who ("Rita Kane saw him lying there and called an ambulance") or that nobody has called an ambulance yet. The wagon takes him to hospital, and from there he goes back to his home and his work (an officer to his post) by himself. If nobody passes, he gets up by himself after an hour, at half his health, and goes on with his day. Nobody calls the police over the beating (a cop on the block who saw it still acts).

Finish him (−15). While he lies where he fell, a boss who was in the fight that put him down — by his own blows or his men's — can kill him: from the fight card's Lying where they fell list (Finish him / Finish her), or, once the fight card is gone, from the man's own card. It costs 15 actions, it asks first, and you must be on his block: the button walks you to arm's length. It's refused while the fight is still on, from another block ("… lies on another block — go there first"), once the ambulance has him or he's in the hospital's hands, and once he's on his feet. It is a murder: a killing on your record, +25 heat, and whoever sees it calls the police (a cop on the block takes you there and then). Only you can do it, never your men — so if you want a man dead, you have to be there. A rival's man lying wounded is finished the same way, where he fell and within the hour. While he lies there, there is nothing more to take: Attack, Rob and Pickpocket are greyed on him, and his card says down, hurt. Finishing an officer is the loudest thing you can do: you go to maximum heat and every patrol car in the city hunts you (see Heat & the police), so Attack on a man in blue always asks first. Lose a fight and you don't die — you go down where you are, and the ambulance takes you to the hospital (see below); only a rival player, present in person, can finish an already-downed boss for the kill — while he's lying where he fell. Once the ambulance has him, it's too late (unless somebody runs the wagon down). Some NPCs fight back and some don't — and walking into a defended building (guards, the owner, or police present) means cowing them all at once or fighting them right there.

Fights play out live. When you start a fight — jumping an active rival player, a street NPC, or a recruit — it no longer resolves in a flash — it opens a Fight card in the bar at the bottom of the screen, beside the log (on a phone, the Details pane), that plays out a turn every ~5 seconds while the right panel keeps your actions where they were. Across its top, who jumped whom and the turn (a fight always ends: after its last turn with both sides still standing it breaks off with no winner); under that, Flee and Surrender, each with one line on what it does — they never ask first, and they stay on screen without scrolling; beside them (below them on a phone), both sides, every man with his health bar, who is down or running, and where the blows land (each side strikes the first man still standing in the other's line — your bodyguards stand in front of you); how far apart you are, who can reach whom and with what; What losing costs you for this kind of fight (open it when you want it); and the blow-by-blow, turn by turn. You can hit Flee on any turn to try to break off: from the next turn your side stops hitting back and tries every turn until it gets away — a fast, high-Speed side (helped by Driving) slips away more often. A fresh rival can still only be beaten to the hospital this way; the kill needs a separate finishing blow once they're down. It cuts both ways: if a rival jumps you, the same card appears and you choose to flee or ride it out. When it's over, the same card stamps the result (WON, LOST, GOT AWAY, NO WINNER…) and says what happens to you next — and if a rival boss went down, an Open him button puts him in the viewer.

A fight holds you where you stand — only Flee gets you out. While it lasts you can't travel, walk off, go through a door or get into your car. Break away and you run for it: forty metres away from the fight by a real way out — off your block or across the street, clear of every one of them, never a lap round your own building — at a sprint (sitting in your car, you drive off a block instead) — and whoever you broke away from can't jump you again for 30 seconds. The same goes for the street: a resident who bolts from a beating really runs off down the pavement. Fighting on a side you don't lead — defending your building against a robbery, caught in somebody's massacre — your Flee is your own: you run, and the rest fight on. (One fight at a time: a man already fighting can't be jumped by somebody else until it's over.)

(Every fight now plays out in real time in the ⚔️ Fight panel — player-vs-player, street NPCs, and recruit brawls alike — a turn every ~5 seconds, with Flee available on any turn. An intimidation shakedown, which ends with no fight at all, still resolves at once.)

Surrender instead of taking a beating. In a fight against another boss, the Fight card gives you a Surrender button next to Flee, at the top of the card (in any other fight it is greyed, with the reason: you can only surrender to another boss). Throw in the towel and the fight ends at the next turn — a player boss takes you alive as a prisoner, held for up to 48 hours, rather than you risking the hospital or a finishing blow. A gang boss takes no prisoners: you're left down with 1 health for the ambulance. It's the sensible play when a fight's gone against you and you'd rather lose some cash than your character. With an officer standing in the fight it is different: a surrender is to the police, never the other boss — see A patrol passing your fight joins it under Heat & the police.

Getting captured. When you surrender to a rival, he holds you at a holding — a purpose-built holding installation or a bunker brig if the fight was fought at one (tough to escape), otherwise his own hideout back room (easier). You're marched there, on foot, by his men. You wait bound where you gave up while the men who were at his side walk over to you, then they walk you there together, at the pace of the slowest of you. If he had nobody at his side, his two nearest free men come to fetch you first; if he has no men at all, you stay bound where you gave up until the hold runs out — nobody walks you off alone. On the way you can still be saved: stop every man walking you (kill them, put them down, or their boss calls them off) and you're free where you stand — one down isn't enough; a ransom paid on the way, or your captor arrested, held or killed, frees you there too, and his men walk back where they came from. While you're held you can't act on the world — no travelling, crimes, or ops — but the held card in the bar at the bottom (Details on a phone) says who holds you, where, and how long until you walk free (the time left over the hold's length, with a bar), then your options: deal over ransom, or try to break out. No one holds you forever — there's a hard max hold (currently ~48h) after which you're automatically let go.

Ransom. Your captor can put a price on your head (paid from your dirty cash). It's a real negotiation: they demand a number, and you pay & walk, counter with your own figure, or refuse outright — a counter bounces the decision back to them. When it's your move the deal sits at the top of the held card, with the dirty cash you have (Pay & walk is greyed, with the reason, when you can't cover it); when it's theirs, the card says what you offered and that you're waiting. The same deal is in your private messages with your captor. The moment both sides agree, the money changes hands and you're let go: you walk out of his door (or, still on the march, you're free where you stand). Holding a prisoner? Your Your prisoners card is the other side of the same deal: for each boss you hold, how long until he walks free, the dirty cash on him, and Demand ransom, his offer with Take / Counter / Refuse (or that you're waiting on him), and Let go.

Breaking out. You don't have to wait for a ransom. From the held card you can spend 20 actions on an escape attempt, at any hour, three ways — Fight out (Strength, Killer, Tough as nails, your attack), Sneak out (Stealth, Spying, Intelligence), or Bolt (Driving, Speed) — each showing your live odds as a number and a word, which get worse the tougher the installation, the more guards are posted, and if the captor is there watching. Search for a shiv first (10 actions; the card shows your chance to find one): a shiv adds 15% to your next break and is used up either way. A failed attempt costs you 15% of your health and a 5-minute wait, and tips off your captor; the card greys the breaks with the reason while you wait (or while you're short of actions). Breaking out of a boss's hold adds no heat. (Breaking out of jail is another matter: see Jail & doing time.)

Springing an ally. Captives can be rescued from the outside: send a crew raid (Attack/Rob) at the block where they're held, and winning it frees everyone held there (they walk out of the door). A prisoner still being marched off is easier: stop every man walking him. A prisoner stashed in a well-guarded installation is hard to reach; one in a lightly held back room is a softer target.

(The county jail runs on the same machinery — with its own odds, its own price for a miss and its own ways out: see Jail & doing time.)

Hurt marks run. A street NPC or recruit you're beating down doesn't politely wait for the end — once they're badly hurt (roughly under a third of their health) they break for it and try to flee on their own, and a mark who slips away keeps whatever you were hoping to take. Corner them fast or watch the loot run off (tuning).

You can also jump a recruit instead of hiring them. Every person at a venue is real — the crew line-up shows an Attack button next to Hire. Beat one down and you take their gear and pocket cash and earn XP (they fight back, and they leave the line-up once beaten). Handy if you'd rather rob the talent than pay for it.

Heat & the police

Click or tap the Heat meter at the top of the screen (or What heat does in the WANTED banner) and the middle of the screen shows Heat & the police: your heat as a number with its band word (Cold under 25, Noticed 25–49, Wanted 50–69, Hunted from 70, where raids start: rare at 70, more often with every point above) and when it will be Cold and gone at the rate it is cooling now; what heat does to you, with your own numbers (from 25 stopped and searched, at most once an hour, and when the next stop can come; from 50 arrested on sight; road stops; dearer trips into watched blocks, even on a trace of heat under 1; raids; and from 40, a hostile rival boss on your block may chase you when you drive off, see It isn't only the law that chases you below); your standing answer if the police corner you (Surrender or Resist, set right there); who calls the police; and every way to cool down, each with whether you can use it now, why not if you can't, and a button to what fixes it (your hideout, the nearest open ground, the courthouse, Stats & skills). Your heat changes what the police do the moment they see you — see the next two paragraphs. Close puts you back on the screen you were on.

Noticed (25–49): stopped and searched. A patrolman on your block (on your side of the door), a patrol car's officers right there in the street, or officers on foot: when one of them who isn't busy with somebody else sees you, he stops you — you're halted where you stand, he stays with you, and a card opens by itself in the bar at the bottom, beside the log (on a phone, Details opens by itself), and gives you 20 seconds to answer:

No answer in 20 seconds is the search — and being away from the game doesn't stop it: an away boss standing where the police walk gets stopped like anyone. While he's asking, everything else waits (your stance, a fight's Flee or Surrender, chat and your settings still work). At most once an hour — a search on the road counts as that hour's stop, and nobody stops you in your first hour out of jail. Never inside your own place, your family's, your home or your hideout, never at the wheel (that's the road stops), and never while you're still a protected newcomer. The heat sheet tells you when the next stop can come.

Your men are stopped by the same rule. A Noticed man of yours who is out at your side is stopped with you: one stop, one card, and you answer for the lot — the search searches each of you from his own pockets, the bribe is each one's price added up, and if you run your men run with you (+10 heat each). If only your man is due (you're Cold, or you were stopped this hour), the police stop you for a look at him and search only him. A Noticed man of yours who is out on his own (posted at a door, dealing on a corner, walking somewhere) is stopped where he stands and, 20 seconds later, searched — he always lets them: his guns and anything illegal he carries are taken, and he's fined out of the cash he carries. Then he carries on where he was going. At most once an hour each, never inside your own place, your home or your hideout, never while he's on a job, hurt or in a hospital bed. You get one line when a search of your men took something; a clean search says nothing.

Wanted (50 and up — Hunted too): arrested on sight. The police who see you put a hand on your collar even if you're doing nothing, for the worst crime on your record, and call the cars: two seconds later it's the arrest where you stand, your Surrender / Resist answer deciding how (see Jail & doing time). Walking past them, you're stopped and collared; running past, you hear "Police! Stop!" and the cars come after you. The WANTED banner shows the hand on your collar — who, the countdown and the charge. Keep off blocks with police on them, and go indoors.

A police car taking a man in is the police. Chasing it, attacking its officers, or opening fire on them to free him is attacking the police, on your record and seen by them; freeing a prisoner (cutting him loose) is a crime of its own (aiding an escape), and slipping away from them is escaping custody. Killing an officer of that car is a cop killing: the manhunt, and the man in the back gets the heat when it was his men who did it.

Your record — what they take you in for. Every crime you commit goes on your record, whether anybody saw it or not, and every arrest names a charge: the crime the law saw, or else the worst on your record (picking pockets, dealing on the street, a hold-up, car theft, assault, attacking a police officer, murder…; a boss who's hot only from his crew's work is taken in for your crew's crimes). The arrest message says it ("…arrests you on the spot for picking pockets"). Every arrest wipes the record clean, and so does cooling all the way down to 0 heat.

Two linked pressures:

Heat is shared across your gang. Your crew's crimes are your crimes: when a crew member does something loud — a street dealer working a corner, a crew raid on a rival — the heat lands on you (the shared pool that draws SWAT) and on that crew member too, equally. And a crew member's own heat has a bite: a hot street dealer is easier for the law to catch — more likely to be robbed or arrested working the corner while blazing. Their heat cools on its own like yours (at your Stealth's pace), so if a dealer's running hot, recall them off the street for a while to let it settle. The phone's CREW list flags a 🔥 next to anyone who's running hot.

Road encounters. Driving past the police can get you pulled over from Noticed (25) up, more often the nearer they are and the hotter you are — the hottest man in the car counts, and your men riding with you are searched with you (on foot it's the stop above instead). While the hottest man aboard is Cold, under 25, no patrol pulls the car over at all: no stop, no toll, no search, no heat. Your men's own cars are pulled over by the same rule, block by block. Somebody real stops you — the nearest patrol car within a couple of blocks that isn't busy (it pulls over; a parked one waits at the kerb), else the nearest officer walking his beat — and the message names them (Officers Rita and Joe). With only busy police around, nobody stops you:

The raids come in SWAT vans you can see coming — but they come back. Run scorching hot (personal heat 70+) and the law stops waiting for you to slip up — it comes to your door. Over time a very hot boss draws raids, even while you're offline, and the hotter you are the more often they come (rare at 70, about three a day at 100). Each one comes in one of the two SWAT vans: it leaves police headquarters with the siren on and drives to wherever you are, and parks on your block, and its men get out and walk to you — in through your door if you're inside — and the raid lands when they reach you — "SWAT — Officers Kane, Moll, Ruiz and Hale — kicked your door in…" — then they walk back to the van. A van coming for you is always on your map, wherever it is (hover it: SWAT van 1 — coming for YOU.), so you can see it on the way. Move and it follows; get on the road and it follows that too. If it can't catch you in 15 minutes it goes home — and comes back five minutes later; from its third try it doesn't need you on the exact block, anywhere within a block of you will do (its men walk the rest). You can put a raid off; you can't dodge it for ever — it stays owed until its men reach you. A raid is a bust: they seize a chunk of the illegal goods you're carrying (never a legal good) and a cut of the cash on you, which discharges most of your heat — and if you're truly blazing, SWAT don't negotiate: they take you down by force and you're driven to the prison hurt, for maximum security, for 8 hours at least (twice your crime's sentence when that's longer), and take every weapon you carry (they can hurt you, and the jail's medical ward patches you up inside; the law can never permanently kill you). Don't sit on a mountain of heat and product.

A cop in a fight radios for backup. Any fight with an officer in it — you resisting arrest, you going for a man in blue, an officer on duty defending a shop you're robbing, a massacre with an officer on duty among the people on the block — gets one call on the radio: "Officer Rita radios for backup." The four nearest patrol cars that can make it in time come with their sirens on and join the fight on the law's side, each officer as himself: "Officers Rita and Joe pull up and join the line!" The fight card says it — Backup: 2 cars on the way — about 18 s, then who joined — and the fight runs up to six turns longer while they drive, so you can't just wait out the clock. Until the first of them gets there a lone officer may still break off; once help arrives they hold the line. The arrest squad itself is the officers really standing there — the crew of the car that caught you, the patrolman on your block — not a squad out of nowhere. Beat the law in a fight that isn't an arrest and nothing changes; lose it — down with an officer still standing — and they take you in, resisted. (A fight between you and an AI family brings no backup to either side; the cars just park and hold the scene.) A road chase doesn't radio: the cars chasing you are already there.

A hurt officer goes to hospital and comes back. An officer you put down in a fight is hurt, never killed by the fight — in an arrest, a chase, a massacre, wherever: he lies where he fell (Patrolman · down, hurt on his row, not the law while he's hurt), the next person who sees him calls the ambulance, and about three-quarters of an hour later he's back at his post — the ward costs nobody anything, and you can't run his ambulance off the road. The only way an officer dies is a boss finishing him while he lies there (Finish him, under Fights). Beaten or not, an attack on an officer is called in by whoever sees it. Attack on a man in blue asks first: "He is a police officer. Beaten, he lies hurt for the ambulance, not dead. Finish him while he lies there and it's a cop killing: maximum heat for you, and every patrol car hunts you." The Resist switch reminds you: "Officers you put down lie hurt, not dead. Finish one and every patrol car comes for you."

Finish one and you go to maximum heat; every patrol car hunts you, and the officers within six blocks. An officer who was the law in the fight that put him down, finished where he lay, puts you — the boss who finished him, and nobody else — at heat 100, with attacking a police officer on your record; your men and the bosses who fought beside you keep their heat. Then the manhunt: a MANHUNT banner appears over the Wanted one — "You killed Officer Rita Kane. Every patrol car in the city is looking for you, and the officers within six blocks." Every patrol car in Rookport drops what it's doing and drives, sirens on, to where you were last seen, and the officers on foot within six blocks of the killing leave their beats to look for you too (the rest stay on theirs). They're still the police on the way — they arrest anybody they catch at a crime. It ends when they've lost you for 10 minutes, after 30 minutes at most, or when you're taken (jailed, in hospital, or dead). Your heat stays at 100 after: that's raids and arrest on sight. The patrols left on the streets are thin while it lasts — and a boss with a cop killing behind him knows it. An officer off duty who was put down in a massacre and finished is a townsperson's murder, not a cop killing.

Finish another while they hunt you and the SWAT vans come. The first killing brings no SWAT — and no raid van comes for you while they hunt you either (your raids wait until the hunt is over). But if you finish an officer from another fight while the hunt is on (backup, a car from the hunt, SWAT themselves, once they're down in a fight of their own), both SWAT vans come for you: "Another officer died — SWAT vans are on the way." They drive to you wherever you are, and when they reach you they get out: SWAT never stop, talk or take a bribe. If you're already fighting the law, they join it; otherwise your arrest stance decides — Surrender and they take you in quietly, Resist and it's a fight against four SWAT men with submachine guns. Two officers of the same fight finished one after the other are one killing, not two; another boss's first killing is his own hunt, not a second one of yours.

Your hideout. Designate a building you own as your hideout (there's a button on the block panel when you're standing on a place you own). When you're inside your hideout lying low, your personal heat cools twice as fast — the active way to go to ground after a hot job, and it stacks with Stealth. You only have one hideout at a time; setting a new one moves it.

Lie low in a field — no hideout needed. Out on open ground (a park, a wood, a field, a footpath, a bridge) there's a 🌾 Lie low here action: spend a few actions to drop off the road and let the heat cool on the spot — around 10 points a spell, more the higher your Stealth. It's the poor man's hideout: no property, no travelling home, available the moment you're hot in the middle of nowhere — the tool for cooling below a heat band before you cross a policed district. And if a patrol is already closing on you, going to ground gives you a real chance to slip it (Stealth raises the odds). The catch is the same one that governs dealing out here: you can't vanish in front of a witness — a passer-by, a shopkeeper, or a cop on the tile blocks it, and the button tells you who. So the crowded park is where you sell, and the empty wood is where you hide. Lying low is not a crime — nobody's harmed by you cooling off — so it draws no caller and no heat of its own.

Upgrade your hideout (any money — the cash on you first) — from anywhere. The Assets tab lists the whole upgrade tree with live prices, and you can buy any of it without travelling home: hiring a contractor is a telephone call. (The block panel still offers the same tree when you happen to be standing there.)

The stash (dirty cash). Your hideout is also a vault. Standing on it, deposit your dirty cash into the stash and it's off your person — so if a rival kills you out on the street, they can't strip it off your body (only the dirty cash you're carrying is looted). It's not untouchable, though: a rival who robs your hideout cracks the stash too, so it's worth fortifying and guarding. Withdraw it whenever you need to spend.

Somebody has to make the call — and gangsters never make it. The police don't just know. A call needs a caller: a police officer on duty on the block who saw it (off duty, he phones it in like anybody), a frightened civilian or shopkeeper, or an alarm the job trips. A civilian or a shopkeeper calls only over a murder, a hold-up or an attack on an officer — and even then he is a witness, who gives you a minute or two to stop him (see Witnesses); nobody calls the police over a small crime. Other gangsters, crew and rival bosses are not callers — nobody in this trade phones the law. So a fight on an empty block, or in a room with nobody in it but the two of you, is a private matter, and where you pick a fight is one of the realest decisions in the game.

Every crime row now tells you this before you commit. Look for the 📞 chip:

(One thing this does not buy you: the getaway delay. The few seconds of fumbling for keys after a job are charged either way — that's you, not the law being told. Otherwise an unwitnessed murder would be a faster exit than a picked pocket.)

Crew › Your men: the roster, and each man's card. At the top, your crew at a glance: how many men, the day's wages (after your Leadership), what the bodyguards walking with you add in a fight, who is idle, and, from your books (every standing income and every standing bill, wages included), either that your income covers it or about how long the cash on you and in your bank lasts at the hourly loss — wages come out of the cash on you (dirty first) and then your bank, never out of a stash, locker or safe, and if you can't pay them the whole crew walks. Under it the crew board (see The crew board: drag and drop below): your teams, the men on their own, your places and your cars. Each man's Card button opens his card with his attack, defence, health, wage, gear and how close he is to a promotion; a man with no gear and a man with points to place say so. Idle men are flagged with what they cost you for nothing and why: recovering from a wound or lying in a hospital bed, walking back from an operation, a dealer out of stock, or a guard or worker posted nowhere. A bodyguard escorting you is not idle - that is the job that keeps you alive. His Card button opens it — beside the board on a wide screen, in its place (with a way back) on a phone; tapping the man himself picks him up to move him, it does not open the card. On the card: his duty (Bodyguard, Guard here, Deal here, Work here and Train here are set where you stand; Spy targets the block you picked on the map and costs 12 actions; each greyed button says why underneath, with a link to what fixes it), who protects him when he works out on the map, his gear (take a piece back, or give him one of your spare pieces), his promotion (the XP he has against what he needs, the price — twice his wage, less your Leadership — and what a level gives: wage ×1.15 and his tier's share of points, 1.4 stat and 0.7 skill for a Common up to 2.4 and 1.2 for a Legendary, fractions adding up to whole points you place), and Let him go, which asks first: it is for good, and the gear he wears goes with him. With no men yet, the screen says what crew is for and where to hire, with a button per kind of recruit venue that opens the Directory on it.

Your holdings tell you where you are thin. The Holdings screen opens with every place you own, worst first, each with a one-word verdict and the reason: EXPOSED (nothing defending it, or the door is still off its hinges and anyone can walk in), THIN (light defense, or money sitting in a safe with nobody on the door), or Held. Each row shows its defense, how many of your crew are on the door, what is inside, and the block heat - and travels you there. If everything is held, it says so in one line and gets out of the way.

What your map remembers now follows your boss, not your browser. Sign in on a phone, a second computer, or after clearing your browser data, and the city you've scouted is still the city you've scouted — the same blocks lit, the same heat and turf as you last saw them, with the same ages on them. It used to live only in the browser you first played in.

Every Intel row says how old it is. A boss you have eyes on right now reads ● in sight. A boss you saw earlier carries the age of that sighting — he may have moved since. And a boss you have never had eyes on now says never scouted, instead of showing a place and a story with no date on it, which used to read exactly like a live sighting. If you want a row to go live, track him and put a camera or an informant on a block he uses.

The shop counter answers too. A greyed Buy button now says why in one line under the row — "⛔ Sold out — nothing on the shelf until this place restocks", "⛔ You need $6 to buy one". A greyed Sell button says it on hover: you aren't carrying any, or you're only carrying one and Sell 5 needs five. And a sale says what it got you — including when the till was too thin to take the lot.

The left panel is a list of what is on this block, grouped by side and foldable. Counted headings you can collapse — 🏢 The building, 🎩 Your people, 🔴 Rival bosses, 🚨 Police, 🛡 SWAT, 🩸 Street muscle, 👁 Lookouts, 🤝 For hire, 🧑 Locals, 🚗 Cars at the kerb, 💀 On the ground — and every row carries a small tag on the right telling you what you are looking at: Law, Hostile, Civilian, War (a boss you have named an enemy), Rival, Hire, Yours, Car, Body. The game remembers which sides you keep folded, so the list stops reopening itself while you read it. Nothing in that panel is a button: click a row and everything you can do about it appears on the right.

It works for any block you can see, not just the one you're standing on. Select a block across the street and you get its street roster the same way — with a line saying you're watching from another block, and every action locked until you travel there. What's inside the building stays hidden until you walk in.

Read the row before you press it. Every crime states its price up front — the actions it spends, whether anybody would phone it in, what it pays, and, where there's a contest, a bar and a sentence telling you how it reads ("They'll pay — your menace 41 against a nerve of 22", "They'll fight — your force 30 vs 50"). If you can't do something, the row says why in plain words instead of the button quietly disappearing — "⛔ Not enough actions: this needs 3 and you have 1", "⛔ Your Locksmith is 2 and this door needs 7".

Once the call is made, the police come. The moment you pull a job that somebody calls in, the nearest patrol cars are alerted and start driving to your block from wherever they are — so how long you've got depends on where the law actually is, not a fixed timer. A violent crime pulls more units. A petty call (a cop who saw you lift a wallet or plant a bug) brings them at an unhurried 24 km/h, slower than a patrol, with no siren until they have seen you — and while you're under Wanted it only looks round the block it was given: two blocks off, or through a door, and they lose you; anything worse and they come with the siren on. You can watch them close in on the map. Get moving before they reach you — if they catch you it's an arrest: they take every weapon you carry, a share of your illegal goods (contraband and stolen goods, never a legal good) and a share of the cash on you, and you do jail time (see Jail & doing time below — your arrest stance sets how it goes). Hit-and-move is the rhythm of crime here.

The officers get out and walk up to you. A patrol car that pulls up near you (within about a block and a half) lets out its two officers (the car's crew, by name; a car a man short sends one), and they come for you on foot — two blue dots on the map, walking, or running when they need to. They move by the same rules as you: a walk and a sprint off their Speed (a middling one: a quick boss can outrun them, a slow one can't), and breath that runs out. The arrest happens where you are standing, when they're close enough to put the cuffs on you. Your stance decides the rest: Surrender and stand still, and you're cuffed — nobody fires a shot; Resist, and it's a fight right there.

Run from them and they shoot. Head away from them within 25 m — a revolver's reach — and you get one shout (walking up to them to give yourself up isn't running): "Police! Stop right there!" Stop (or turn back to them) and it goes no further. Keep going for two more seconds and they open fire: it's the arrest fight, with you already on the run, and they're shooting from where they stand. Break away and you're a marked fugitive — they hold their fire for a little while as they close the gap, then it starts again. The wanted card tells you how many are on foot, how far off they are and whether they're running — and when you're inside their 25 m, it says so.

Fleeing and losing them. If a patrol has eyes on you it gives chase, following you from block to block (the cars chasing you flash red, and a WANTED banner shows how many are after you). To shake them you have to break their line of sight and go to ground: get out of their view and duck inside a non-hostile building. Sit tight with no police sighting you for about a minute and they call off the chase. But only if they didn't see you go in: if they watched you go through a door, they walk up and follow you inside, and the arrest happens in there — unless the place has guards posted in it (yours, or your family's): then they stop at the door, and that's a job for SWAT. And the call itself can say where you are: rob the till and stay put, or stay past a burglary's alarm, and they come to that building and straight in after you. Stay out in the open where they can see you and they'll run you down.

Travelling doesn't hide you. A patrol that can see you (about four blocks) sees you walking or driving, just as it sees you standing. Stopping on the way lets them catch up: stop a trip with the police after you and every car hunting you turns for the spot you stopped on, and the minute they need before they give up only starts once they get there.

Drive off while they're hunting you and it becomes a road chase — the moment you pull away, whether you were sat in the car or walked to it first. Gun it in a working car with the law on your tail and the pursuit turns into a real fight between the moving cars, on the same ⚔️ Fight panel as everything else: a pursuit cruiser fronts their line with officers firing from behind it, and your own car fronts yours — their fire hits the ride first, chewing its condition down (the driver just drives; it's your passengers who shoot back, so riding crew matters). Their revolvers reach 25 m: further back than that, nobody's hitting anybody. Your ways out: open the gap (see below), hit 🏃 Flee to put your foot down, or hold on until the chase burns out (~8 turns) and you lose them in traffic. Shoot the cruiser and its officers off the road and you're free but marked (a big heat spike). Get everyone downed and they drag you from the wreck — jail, hurt, on the resisting sentence. Every scratch the chase puts on your car lands on its real condition afterward — a ride shot to a standstill is a wreck. Nobody on foot shoots at a car driving off: officers who were walking up to you run back to their own car and come after you in it — and if the car behind you is theirs, it can't leave until they're back in it. That's your head start. (tuning)

The chase is driven on real streets. A pursuit isn't just a card — it has a route, and both cars are on the map driving it. The police car starts from wherever it really was: parked right behind you, it's on your bumper; three blocks away, it has three blocks of road to make up first — and one across town never gets close. Both cars are drawn, yours in green and theirs in red, with the road you're on dotted out ahead. Every turn both cars move at their own speed: a roadster really does pull away from a cruiser, a rusted beater really does get run down, and a car that's been shot up slows as its condition drops. A gap meter at the top of the map shows the live gap in blocks (a block is 60 m), from 0 to 4: it says who is after whom, how much more road settles it, what each end of the bar means (boxed in if you stop with them within a block; lost them at four clear blocks), who can shoot whom right now, and the chase's turn with how long until it burns out. When you're the one chasing (a rival, or an ambulance), the bar fills as you close in. Hover it for the whole rule. That gap is the chase:

It isn't only the law that chases you. Drive off a block where a hostile rival boss is standing and — if there's blood in the water — they may come after you. The trigger is weakness or notoriety: you're under 60% health or carrying 40+ heat. A boss in good shape and out of the spotlight usually drives off unbothered; a bloodied one gets followed. The keenest rival present (the highest-level one with a working car) pulls out behind you, and it plays out as the same road chase on the ⚔️ Fight panel — except nobody's taking you to jail. Both cars come out of it wearing the damage, the loser goes down where his car stops (and the ambulance comes for him), and you'll get an alert naming whoever came after you. Your own family and any clan you have a peace treaty with never give chase, and a brand-new player who hasn't committed their first crime is never hunted.

Ambulances on the street — and what you can do to them. When somebody is beaten down, the city sends a wagon from the nearest hospital to collect them. It's a real object: you can see it on the map within your vision (a white wagon, flashing while it's carrying somebody), driving out to the scene and back. The patient rides in it — out of everybody's reach until he's in the ward. The crew are the hospital's paramedics, by name — two while the hospital has two on duty, otherwise one, so a wagon never waits — and the wagon's card shows each of them, with his job, hours, pay and home. Two ways to stop it:

Either way it's an ugly crime: 8 heat. The crew don't call the police over a wagon stopped; only a cop on that block who sees it arrests you. You can't stop the wagon coming for you.

You always know where the hunt stands. The banner tells you exactly which state you're in: "They can SEE you" — break their line of sight, put blocks or a building between you — or "Out of their sight — stay hidden ~Ns more" with a live countdown to them giving up. And hot ground shows on the map: any block you can see (your own eyes, a camera, or an informant's) glows red with police presence — the redder, the hotter — so you can pick a route around trouble before it finds you.

Keep heat down by laying low (especially at your hideout), avoiding hot tiles, offloading contraband, and letting time cool you off.

Jail & doing time

Getting caught by the law now means a real arrest and jail time at the county prison on the city's northern edge — not a quick rough-up.

The ride to the prison. Nobody is dropped into a cell from the street. Once you're taken you're cuffed where you stand, and the officers drive you to the prison in their car: the car that took you if it's right there, otherwise the nearest free patrol car in the city comes for you while you wait in cuffs — and if a police car right by you comes free before it gets there (after a fight, the officers getting back into their cars), that one takes you instead; your arrest card says how far off the car coming for you is and why no nearer one has taken you yet (late at night, with every car empty, the nearest station calls an officer in from home to drive one — nobody is left waiting for good). They walk you to the car, drive you to the prison at a police car's speed — among the fastest cars in the city — and walk you in through the door. You're booked the moment you're taken: your sentence starts there and then, so the ride counts as time served, and you can post bail from the back of the car (the car drives on and you're let out at the prison gate). The break, the shiv search and the laundry wait until you're inside. Your posted men keep working, and your bodyguards go to your place and wait for you there (see Crew). On the map, while they drive you, you aren't drawn: the police car carrying you is where you are — Follow me keeps the camera on it and your sight of the streets goes with it. Cuffed, and walked to the car and in through the door, you're drawn on foot at your spot with the officers beside you. Everybody else sees a police car on a prisoner run. Once they have you, nobody is hunting you any more: the WANTED banner goes when the cuffs go on, and a block you look at from the back of the car says you can watch it, not act on it.

The car taking you to the prison can be stopped. The ride is real, so it can be hit. The police take you in the nearest free patrol car, about a minute and a half from the cuffs to the cell, and nobody waits for an escort. Nobody is told where you are being driven: not your family, not your friends. A rival who knows your face and sees the car can tell it is you in the back; anyone else sees a police car with a prisoner in it. A broker sells the hour you walk out (see Intel).

Getting out — Meet me at the gate. The pickup at the gate is a team's. Launch it while you're free: the team, then The prison gate, then Pick you up when you're out, then whether they take you home, to your hideout or stay (a place you haven't got is shut). A man on his own is made a team first, in one tap. It's a standing order, armed by your arrest, and its men and its car are the team's when they set off (after a Split, the new men). The pickup card on Crew › Your men says what is set, with Change… and Call it off. From the cell it's one phone call, by the team. A wreck is no car for it: a team whose car can't drive (a wreck, on a tow truck, in the pound), or that has no car, still comes, waits at the gate on foot and walks with you, and then there is no home or hideout to pick. Your men set off in time to be at the gate a few minutes before you walk out, and they re-time it when your release moves (bail, the judge, the doubling). At the gate, online, you take the wheel; away, your man drives you where you said. A car that is late picks you up on your walk home. Nobody of yours at the gate, and you are on your own: the gate gives you no protection.

The time fits the crime. The court gives the sentence the crime you're charged with deserves:

SentenceFor
20 minpicking pockets · planting a listening device · carrying illegal goods
40 mindealing on the street · robbing a delivery truck · running a street racket · running a man off his corner · running from the police · extortion · your crew's crimes
1 harmed robbery · a hold-up · car theft · breaking in (a lock picked with no alarm)
2 hassault · breaking and entering (with the alarm going) · carjacking · breaking out of jail
4 hattacking a police officer
6 hmurder

Your arrest stance decides how it goes. While the police are after you, the WANTED banner carries a stance toggle — set it before they reach you. It says what this arrest would be for and how long it would mean:

Anyone in for 4 hours or more goes to maximum security even after coming quietly. Nobody is held more than 48 hours in all.

Every way the police take you in — surrender, a lost resist, a chase that ends in a wreck, a SWAT raid — they take the cash on you (a share of it), every weapon you carry (in your hands and in your inventory) and your illegal goods (a share of the contraband and stolen goods you carry). Never a legal good, and never the bank. That is every arrest, a picked pocket's too: the bat in your belt goes with the rest. Taken in your car, they go through its boot by the same rule (every weapon in it, a share of its illegal goods); a car of yours parked anywhere else isn't touched. And the arrest settles your heat (the bust discharges most of it).

What you're in for. Every arrest names its charge — the crime the police saw, or else the worst crime on your record (see Your record under Heat & the police) — and the arrest message says it, with the sentence. Going in wipes your record clean.

Life inside. While jailed you can't act on the world — no travel, crimes, or ops — but the jail card in the bar at the bottom (Details on a phone) shows what you're in for and the time left (with a bar), and your ways out: Pay or work your way out (bail, the judge's envelope and a laundry shift, each with its price on the button, greyed with the reason when you can't) and Make a break (each break's odds, and the shiv search). The cell never locks: you can try a break or hunt for a shiv at any hour. The card also says where the prison is and where the courthouse is, for a friend coming to post your bail. The jail's own medical ward quietly heals you the whole time you're inside — go in beaten, come out patched.

Getting out:

Out at the gate — and the walk home. However you get out (your time served, bail, the judge's envelope, the laundry), you come out of the prison gate onto the street outside. When your time is up you walk out of the prison gate. If you are away, you walk home. Away means the game is closed or has logged you off (see Here or away, under Alerts), or you've done nothing for a minute since you came out (the card at the gate says when you set off and how long the walk takes on foot); the walk home costs no actions, and the moment you do anything it stops and you're steering him again. If your bodyguards were sent to your place while you were held, they are still there, waiting for word: the notice you get at the gate says so, and you call them back from Crew. You are alone and on foot: have your crew there — a rival who knows when your time is up can be waiting for you at the gate.

Your men and the law. Your men do as you do. The men at your side when the police take you (on foot beside you, or in your car) go quietly, run or fight with you, and they are taken with you and serve your time. They ride in two to a police car (the seat beside you first), walk in through the same door, and come out when their time is up, or when you post their bail. A man let out with no pickup for him (his time served, his bail, let go at the gate off the ride) goes to your hideout and waits for your word there (lying low when he is Wanted or worse); with no hideout he goes home and waits for your word; with neither, he waits for your word outside the gate of the prison. He never goes back to his post or his corner by himself: give him his order again. He stays in his team (the team's order is not run again). A dealer busted on his corner is the same: put him back on his corner when he is out. A man of your own pickup at the gate is left at the gate for it. Men following you in another car do what you do: if you go quietly they pull over and are taken with you; if you fight or run they drive off, and they are chased the way you are: by the patrol cars hunting you or the nearest free ones a call would send, from wherever those cars really are, so a cruiser a long way back has a lot of road to make up (with no patrol car free, they get away). Shot at, their car keeps going, the same as yours does in a chase. If they lose the police they are free, but hot: each man's heat climbs as yours does when you get away, and he heads for your hideout to lie low. If the police catch up with them where the car stops, the officers walk up, and a man still on the pavement when they reach him is picked up; a man who got through a door first is free. You get one line when the chase starts and one when it ends, naming who was taken and who got away.

The phone from your cell. You can still run your crew from inside, if you can get to a phone. Your own phone goes into the property room at the door, and you get it back when you walk out. Inside, find a phone on the jail card:

The courthouse — the law's business, done in person. The city's one courthouse, downtown, sits by day (6am–6pm on the city's clock: one real hour sitting, the next shut). From the steps its card only tells you that; step inside while the court sits and it opens ⚖️ The court:

Every dollar paid to the law — a fixed case, a bail, a judge's envelope — goes into the court's coffers. It doesn't vanish. (It's also where a prisoner's laundry pay comes from — an empty treasury pays nothing.)

Vision & intel

The map has fog — you see your own tile and anything you have eyes on. Extend your sight:

All remote feeds need a phone in your pocket to receive.

You only know what you've seen. Every building in the city is one of four things to you, and its card says which:

You can always see next door — your block and the eight around it are live to you from the street, the way a fixer watches his corner. Seeing isn't reaching: to rob, buy, hire or fight there you still have to go there, and to see into a room you have to walk in or put eyes in it.

That's what makes intel worth paying for: scout it with a crew op, station an informant, or plant a bug before you commit to a robbery or a raid.

Bugging a rival's place. Walk into any building that isn't yours and plant a listening device ($1,500, 12 actions, burner required) — it's fitted in the room, so the button is only there once you're inside. It gives you a live feed of the inside of that building for about a day — the till, the guards, who comes and goes — with nobody exposed on the ground — the cheapest way to watch a rival's warehouse before you hit it. Planting is a crime (a little heat), and it's a roll of your Spying against the block's security: get made and the owner is told exactly who was fitting a wire in their bar.

Sweeping your own. On a building you own, 🔎 Sweep for bugs. Like traps, it's absolute: you only find a device your Security technician level strictly beats — so a master's bug survives an amateur's sweep, and a clean sweep result doesn't prove there's nothing there. Pull one and the person who planted it gets told you found it.

Eyes on the city

Every pair of eyes you own, on one screen — City › Eyes on the city. A summary card on top says how many eyes you have, how many are live and how many dark, how much of Rookport they open on your map (blocks out of the whole city), how many buildings you hear the inside of, which districts they're in, and what they cost to keep: of these eyes, only your men posted on a block cost a wage — the screen adds up the wages of every man it lists, on guard, spying or posted for another job (shown a day, after your Leadership), since every man draws his wage whatever his job; cameras and informants are paid for once, and a bug runs on its battery. Below it, one group per kind — cameras on buildings you hold, informants on corners, men on guard, spies on enemy turf, listening devices you've planted — and each row says where it is, whether it's reporting right now, what it shows you and for how long, with Show on map and Travel (its price in actions, or why it's greyed). Your men posted for another job (working, dealing, training) and your family's cameras open their blocks too, so they're listed as well. Any kind you don't have yet is under More eyes, with how you get it and a button straight there; with no eyes at all, that list is the whole screen.

It tells you what each one actually shows you, because they are not the same thing:

The two things with a clock on them are flagged. A planted bug runs about a real day on its own battery and then simply stops — nothing renews it, you go back and plant another — and the screen counts it down, in amber under the hour. A spy shows how long until he walks home. Everything else is permanent for as long as you hold it.

A spy who's been made says so. Detection is absolute — only an owner who out-levels his Spying can see him at all — but once he's spotted, the block's owner knows his name and can jump him.

🚨 And all of it relays through a burner. No phone in your pocket and every camera, informant and garrison you own goes dark — you still own them, they just report to nobody, and your map shows you nothing but the blocks around you. A spy's street goes dark too, though what's inside the building he sits on still reaches you. The screen says so in red right under the summary when it applies, with the one button that fixes it — Switch your phone on, Use the stolen phone, or Where to buy a phone (the Directory searched for one) — because it's the one mistake that quietly wastes every dollar you've spent on vision. (A bug already planted is the exception: it runs on its own battery.) Your phone shows the first six of these, with a button through to the full board.

Informants are real people on the block — and killable. The hireable street kid and fixer stand on the block as tappable characters: open one in the viewer to see their portrait, price and coverage before you pay, and hire straight from the card (or the row's button). Once on your payroll, your lookout lists there in green with what they cover. A stationed lookout shows up as its own coloured dot on the tile (orange for a rival's — the special-function colour — green for your own). If you're standing out on the street where a rival has a lookout, you can take them out from their row or dot via the viewer (a cheap move, −12 actions) — you run them off, pocket what they have on them (a lookout keeps a few dollars of his fee in his pocket — never his family's savings), and their eyes on that block go dark (the owner loses that vision). It draws a little heat. You can't touch your own lookouts.

Clans — the family

Rookport's endgame is played in families. Crew › Family is where it all runs. Not in one yet, it shows the invitations waiting for you (Join or Decline each, Re-up for last round's family; with none, it says plainly that chat is the way in — ask who's taking men on — with Ask in chat as its main button, and Rankings beside it) and Found your own, with the price and what you have, and the reason printed when you're short. In a family, it opens on the family's name, its size, your chair (hover it for what the chair lets you do) and how long you're bound, with Family chat. Under that: The table (every member, his chair and whether he's Active, Quiet or Dark — away 36 hours or more), with inviting under it; What you may do (your cash a day and what's left, your items a day from the stores, and your rights, yours and not yours, any the Don set for you ringed in gold); Other families (the treaties); The family's stores; Every chair, as it starts (each chair's cash a day); The stronghold, with the vault in it; and Family raids. Every greyed button says why under it.

Founding one. Founding a family costs $25,000 (tuning) — lawyers, a room, and the first round of favours — in any money, the cash on you first; and you're charged only once the name and tag are accepted, so a rejected name never costs you a cent. Pay it and you found a clan as its Don: pick a family name and a short [TAG]. A clan holds at most ten made members — a deliberate cap, so no single family can swallow the city — and how many it can number today is its stronghold's size (below): 3 men and the Don to begin with.

Getting made. The only door in is an invitation: a member the Don lets invite asks a boss by name, and the invitation lands on that boss's own Crew › Family screen (it stands for 48 hours). Accept and you're made — seated at the bottom of the table as a man of honor.

The hierarchy. The roster is the classic family table: the Don, his one right hand, consiglieri, capos, and men of honor. The Don alone hands out the chairs. A chair is where a member starts — what each rank may do is below, and the Don can change any of it for any member on What you may do / Who may do what.

Joining is binding. Membership is a round-long commitment — you can't leave, and you can't be thrown out, until the round ends. No clan-hopping, no joining a rival family to spy for a week. The one exception: a member who goes dark for 36+ hours (long enough for a full action meter to sit idle) is dead weight, and the Don or his right hand can cut them loose. Death also ends a membership — a dead boss's chair is cleared, and a family whose last member dies is gone.

Who may do what. The Don decides, member by member, what each man may do for the family. His rank is only the starting point:

What it lets him doWho has it to start with
Keyswalk into the family's buildings — the stronghold too — when they're shutright hand, consigliere, capo
Cash a real daydraw the family's money: one daily figure for the vault and the family's safes and tills togetherright hand $10,000 · consigliere $5,000 · capo $2,000 · man of honor $500
Storestake goods, gear and cars out of the family's buildings, its armory and its garageright hand, consigliere, capo
Run placesthe family's buildings' camera, bug sweep, traps, locks, staff, repairs and conversions (paid from his own pocket)right hand, consigliere
Buybuy a building for the family — the vault pays, in clean moneyright hand, consigliere
Sign oversign one of the family's buildings over to a memberright hand
Invite · Cut looseinvite a boss in · cut loose a member who has gone dark for 36 hoursright hand, consigliere · right hand
Other familiesmove money to a family you have a treaty withright hand

The Don sees the whole table on Crew › Family, under Who may do what: tick or untick anything for anyone, type a man's own cash figure, and Reset puts him back to what his chair gives. A switch the Don has set wears a gold ring, and its tooltip says what the rank would have given. Everyone else reads What you may do: his own rights, and how much of today's cash he has left. Hand a man a new chair and he starts again from that chair. The ranks, the treaties, the stronghold and the panel itself stay the Don's alone — and nothing caps the Don.

The stronghold. Any building the family can use becomes its stronghold — the family's own, one the Don owns, or one that's for sale (he buys it in the family's name). The Don does it from the building's card: 🏰 Make it the stronghold. The fit-out is $2,500 for a small one, $10,000 for a medium one, $25,000 for a large one (tuning) — moving up is a step you pay for — and a building for sale costs its price on top: clean money, from his bank, like every family purchase. From then on it is only the stronghold: no business runs in it, the map wears the stronghold's sign, and the walls, the locks and the safe stay as they were. It opens the family vault. It doesn't make anyone faster — every boss's actions refill at the same rate. And it is real territory — garrison it, fortify it, and defend it, because rivals can raid it like anything else you hold (and a raid that beats its defense leaves it open to their break-in for half an hour).

Its size is what it holds (tuning):

StrongholdMen (and the Don)ArmoryGarageBack roomWallsFortificationsGuards
Small — a house, a bar, a shop…310 pieces2 cars200 units—to tier 14
Medium — a garage, a gym, an office…625 pieces5 cars600 units+3to tier 28
Large — a hotel, a casino, a warehouse…950 pieces10 cars1,500 units+6to tier 312

A family with no stronghold numbers 3 men and the Don. A smaller stronghold never drops anyone or throws anything out — it only stops new invitations and takes no more (a man re-upping at the round's turn keeps his chair whatever the size). The vault has no limit. Fortify it from its card — whoever runs the family's places, standing in it, from his own pocket, any money ($2,000 · $4,000 · $8,000 a tier, +3 defense and +1 security each) — up to its size's tier. The guards are the members' crew posted there, and every man of a team guarding it: each takes a bunk. A team sent to guard the stronghold needs a bunk for every man before anyone goes; short of bunks, the order says how many are left and nobody moves. Men already posted are never turned out. The Defense on the card of the stronghold, or of any building held in the family's name, counts the guards of every member of the family.

Moving up. To trade up, make a bigger building the stronghold: the family moves, and the old one stays the family's — an empty building of its size under the stronghold's sign, to refit into a business or sign over. The three fortress bunkers on the rough edges of town are large buildings like any other now: for sale to anyone at a large building's price, a stronghold for whoever makes it one.

Moving out. The Don can move the family out of its stronghold (Crew › Family, Move out of the stronghold on the stronghold card, and it asks first). The building goes back on the market for anyone to buy; the vault and the armory move out with the family and open again at its next stronghold. The family's cars stay where they were driven: they roll out of the old stronghold's door one at a time, to be driven away before the tow truck comes. (Making a new stronghold instead keeps the old one the family's, and its cars stay in its bays.) The walls you fortified stay with the building. A rival family's stronghold is only ever for sale once that family is wiped out or has moved out.

The family vault. The stronghold opens the common vault — the clan's pooled war-chest, clean and dirty money tracked separately. It's a real room at the base: you deposit and draw standing in the stronghold, not from an app. Everyone can pay in; what you can draw per day is your cash figure on What you may do / Who may do what — one number for the vault and the family's safes and tills together, so a man can't take his day from the vault and then another from the till. The Don draws freely, his right hand a lot, a fresh man of honor only a little (the trust ladder is the point: anyone the Don trusts enough can spend the family's money).

And the Don sets that ladder himself. The daily draw for each chair (a real day: it starts again at 00:00 UTC) is your family's own figure, not a house rule: the Don can tighten it after a betrayal, open it up for a war, or set a rank to nothing at all and mean it. Every member can read the whole ladder — it's the deal you accepted when you took the chair, and a member who can't see what the ranks above him can take doesn't really know what he joined. Only the Don can change it, and not even the Don can cap the Don: whoever sits in that chair can empty the vault, and that trust is the point of the chair. You can also set a daily tribute — a standing figure a city day, to the cent, paid automatically into the vault, crime money first (what you type is a city day's: $4.17 a day is $50 over a real day). Two big consequences: your deposits survive your death — the one hedge against losing everything when a boss falls — and the vault is only as safe as the stronghold around it: a robbery cracks half of it, a wrecking crew takes all of it, and losing the stronghold loses the war-chest.

The family's stores. Money isn't all a family can hold. At the stronghold there's also an armory (pool your gear), a garage — the stronghold's own bays, as many as its size holds: drive a car in to hand it over, and a car you sign out rolls out of its bay at the door for you —, and property in the family's name — stand on a building you own and deed it to the clan: its takings run straight into the vault, every member's guards defend it — against a crew raid and a man walking in alike —, nobody can buy it or shake it down, and it stops being yours to lose when you die. When a family is wiped out, everything in its name is released — and what its vault still held stays in the vault room, for whoever gets in. Anyone can pay into the stores; drawing out is for the men the Don gives the stores to, so many pieces a day by chair — the Don takes what he likes, and a man of honor he trusts signs out one a day. The same goes inside the family's buildings: anyone can stock the shelf or put money in the safe, but taking from them is the stores (goods) and the cash figure (money). Signing property back out to a member is the Don's to give (the Sign over switch). A camera on one of the family's buildings watches for every member who carries a phone, a clanmate's own guards don't shoot his family at his door, and a legal front in the family's name has its payroll met by the vault, which takes its takings.

Name your own chairs. The five ranks and their powers never change, but the Don can rename them — call your capos Skippers, your right hand the Underboss, whatever your family sounds like.

Treaties — the one formal instrument between families. A Don can propose a peace treaty to another family; their Don signs it. While it holds: neither side's ambushes, sieges or crew operations touch the other — you literally cannot launch a job on their property until you tear it up — and whoever the Don trusts with the other families (the right hand, to start with) can move money from vault to vault, which is how families fund each other. It is deliberately not a merger: no shared vault, no combined ops, and both families stay capped at ten. Tearing one up tells both sides instantly, so there's no free first strike.

Family standings. The Rankings screen carries a family table beside the personal one, scoring each clan on its living members' combined net worth plus what the clan holds in its own name — the vault (in full) and any property deeded to it (each building at its price, the cash in its safe at half, like a boss's own). Pooling doesn't hide how heavy a family really is.

When the round turns over. A family doesn't quietly roll into the next round with everything it had. At the reset the material goes the way of everyone else's — the vault is emptied, the armory is cleared and the family's cars are gone, the stronghold is lost (the city goes back to the map it started with: every refit, rebuild and stronghold goes with the round), and standing peace treaties lapse with the round that made them. What survives is the family itself: its name, its tag, and its Don (if he didn't make it, the most senior survivor takes the chair).

Everyone re-ups by choice. Membership binds for a round, not forever, so the roster is re-formed, never rolled over. Every other member wakes up a free agent holding a standing re-invitation from their Don — accept it and you go straight back into the rank you held, decline it and you walk away clean. You have a week to answer.

The top ten families collect a head start for the new round — the reward for where the family placed (tuning):

Family finishVault seedThe next strongholdEvery member
1st$25,000 cleanhalf price, walls already upaction meter topped to 25%
2nd–3rd$12,000 clean35% offaction meter topped to 15%
4th–10th$5,000 clean20% off—

The seed and the action bump are paid the moment the round turns; the discount waits until your Don makes a building the family's stronghold — it comes off the whole bill (the building, if he buys one, and the fit-out) — and the champions' walls go up as high as the stronghold's size allows (tier 2; tier 1 in a small one). It is spent the first time he does. Everyone is told: the Don gets a message saying where the family finished and what it bought, the members read it in their re-invitation, and a family outside the top ten is told why its vault opens empty. The same table is on the Standings screen all round long, with your family's band lit. Like every head start in Rookport it's a fast start, not a lead you keep — the seed can be robbed out of the vault by day two.

Whose side it's on

Every hostile move in Rookport asks one question first: whose side is this on?

Chat — talking to the city

Contacts › Chat opens the city's rooms as a full screen in the middle of the page. On the left is the list of channels, each saying who reads it, with a gold New when something came in since you last looked (a red Urgent on Alerts when something can't wait); under them, your private threads, newest first. On the right is the open room: its name, who reads it, the lines oldest first, and the box to write in. On a phone, or when the middle of the screen is narrow, the channels sit in a row above the room instead. Five channels:

The box under a room says where your line goes (Say something to Little Sicily, Write to Tony Marchetti). What you send is signed with your boss's name and stays — there is no delete. If a line doesn't go through (too fast, or the boss has blocked you), the reason shows under the box.

Ransoms are negotiated right in the private thread. When someone takes you prisoner — or you take them — the demand lands in the conversation between you as a deal card: who holds whom, the figure in dirty cash, whose move it is, and Accept · Counter · Refuse on the card itself when it's your move (when it isn't, the card says who you're waiting on). Paying a ransom to walk free asks first. Counter with your own number and it becomes their move; the superseded offers stay in the thread, marked as replaced, so you can read the whole haggle back. Accept and the money changes hands and the cell door opens on the spot. If the server turns a move down (a counter too low, say), the reason shows on the card. A deal whose hold has ended — a break-out, a rescue, a release, or the clock running out — reads No longer open and has no buttons. While a deal is open it also sits in the left column under Private messages, with how long the hold has left and a link that brings the captive panel (or Your prisoners) into view; on a phone it leads the private-messages list instead. (The captive panel still carries the same deal — it's one negotiation, seen from two places.)

You're in charge of your own feed: the block button at the end of any other boss's line hides his lines from your rooms everywhere, and he can't message you at all — it's the same block as on his row under People, which is where you undo it.

Intel — keeping tabs on a boss

Open Contacts › People and every other boss you know of is on one list, in groups: Waiting on you (bosses who offered you friendship), Friends, Enemies, Tracking, and Others you've crossed — anyone who's stood on a block you could see, messaged you, traded with you or come to blows with you: the ones in sight first, then the most recently seen, and the never-seen at the bottom. Each row says what you know of him and how old it is — In sight now, Last seen 40 min ago with the block and district, or No sighting on record — plus your last dealings ("messaged you", "you attacked them"), with Map (pick that block on the map) and Travel (its price in actions on the button, greyed with the reason when you can't go). Pick a row and his card opens beside the list (on a phone, in place of it, with a way back): where he is, Track / Stop tracking, offer or answer friendship, mark him an enemy, your phone (messages, contacts, block) — and, when he's standing on your own block, a button that opens him in the viewer with everything you can do to him. Find any living boss by name in the search box at the top, then track him or open his card. Nobody on the list yet? The screen says how people get onto it, with buttons to search, open the map or open Chat. Anything you bought from the broker is at the bottom under Addresses you bought, with its age.

What you see is limited to what you can actually see. When a boss is standing on a block you have eyes on — the tile you're on and the ring around it, or anywhere a camera on a building you own or a lookout of yours can watch — Intel shows his live location and what he's doing right now (on the block, inside, on the move, in a fight, in jail). When he's out of your sight, you get the last sighting instead: where and when you last saw him, and what he was doing then. Tracking a boss (up to 20) is what keeps the log running while you're away: about once a minute the game checks where each tracked boss is standing, and if it's a block you can see, that sighting is logged, even when you're offline; anyone else is only logged while you're playing. It's where he stands that counts: a boss on a trip counts as still on the block he set off from, so one just passing through a block you watch isn't caught. So a lookout on a corner he hangs around quietly keeps a log on him. Sightings are kept only while the server runs: a restart forgets them. Stopping tracking forgets his last sighting and your last dealings with him. (You need your phone switched on for the remote feeds to reach you — the screen says so, with a link to fix it.)

People — friends, enemies, and messaging other bosses

Everything about other bosses lives on Contacts › People (above): one list, and one card per boss where you decide how you feel about him and talk to him. (There used to be a Social tab, then two Intel panels; it is one screen now.)

Marking an enemy needs nobody's permission. Mark any boss an enemy from his card on People or from a rival's viewer. An enemy who turns up on your block is flagged loud: a red banner in the viewer, a red ENEMY tag on their row, and the Attack button right there so you can strike first. But it's still your swing — nothing attacks on its own while you're away (that would just get your boss killed while you slept).

A friendship takes two. Offer sends the other boss an offer. Until he accepts it means nothing — it shows as Offer sent on your list and under Waiting on you on his, and either of you can withdraw or refuse it. Once he accepts you are friends both ways, and it buys you two things: you can trade hand to hand (the table is for friends and family only), and neither of your crews jumps the other on sight — an ambush your crew is holding, or a rival's car chase, lets a friend go by. It is a smaller version of a family peace treaty, between two people.

You can still turn on a friend — and the first time you do, it's over. Attack him, go through his pockets while he's down, break into his place, plant a bug there, go for his car, take out his lookout, muscle in on his racket, call him out over a take, send your crew at his place: any hostile move against a friend or his things ends the friendship for both of you, and he's told who did it — the game tells you too. A move that's refused or can't happen doesn't count; a botched one does. Breaking it off without a move is one button, and he's told that as well; marking an old friend an enemy does the same thing.

Phone contacts and messages. You can send messages to any living boss (not the bosses of the four gangs) — a private thread, back and forth, with unread counts — from Messages on his card; no contact needed. Adding him to your contacts just keeps him on your People list with an In your phone tag. It's the same conversation as the chat's private messages: whatever you two say, from either place, is one thread you can read from either place (and a ransom offer shows in it too). Anyone can message you unless you've blocked them — from his card, from the conversation, or with the block button on his line in Chat, it's one block: it stops their messages cold and hides their lines in the chat (blocking is one-way — you can still message someone you've blocked). Unblock on his card or in the conversation lets them back. Use it to broker a truce, warn a friend, or tell an enemy exactly what's coming.

Trading with another boss

Two bosses standing on the same block — friends, or family — can trade — goods, gear and cash, both ways, in one exchange. A stranger's 🤝 Trade is greyed until you're friends (a counter is always open to anybody). Select him on the block and hit 🤝 Trade; he gets the invitation and sits down, and a table opens for both of you.

Putting things on the table. You offer out of anything you can reach that's yours — your pockets, your car's boot, your locker at home, the stash or safe of a building you own on that block — and he does the same on his side. You each see both halves of the deal, line by line. Gear moves as itself: this exact pistol, at this exact wear.

Nothing moves until you both accept. And the rule that keeps it honest: any change to either offer cancels both acceptances. If he agrees to your ten units and you quietly cut it to one, his acceptance is gone and he has to look again. So what you agreed to is always what you were looking at.

It's all or nothing. When you both accept, the game re-checks every line — that you both still have what you offered, and that you can each carry what you're being handed — before a single thing moves. If anything has changed, the deal is called off with a reason and nothing changes hands. There is no half-trade.

Money keeps its colour. Dirty cash arrives dirty; clean cash arrives clean. A trade is not a laundry.

It's a meeting, so it needs both of you there. The table stays open only while you're both on that block, on the same side of the door, alive and standing still. If either of you walks off, steps inside, or is put in hospital, the deal ends. Which makes a quiet patch of open ground — a field at the edge of the map — the natural place to meet somebody you don't entirely trust.

The boards — bugs, feedback and everything else

Chat is your character talking. Contacts › Boards is you talking — to the people running Rookport, and to the other players out of character. The screen opens on the two things most people come for — Report a bug and Send feedback, each one button — then the three boards with a line on what each is for, how many threads it holds and when it last had a post, then the newest threads across all of them (who started each, how many replies, who posted last and when), and the house rules: what to do before you post and what happens after. Every thread row says the same; a bug thread also carries its status. Three boards:

Reporting a bug takes one sentence. Hit 🐞 Report a bug, say what happened and what you expected, and the game attaches the rest for you: your character and level, the block you were standing on, the round, your actions and heat, your screen, and your last dozen actions from the log. You can open the attachment and read exactly what's being sent before you post it — and once it's up, only you and the operator can see that block. Everyone else just sees that a report has details attached.

Your posts belong to your account, not your character. Your boss can be gunned down and the round can wipe the whole city, and your threads are still there under your name — you can answer your own bug report after the character who filed it is in the graveyard.

Bug threads carry a status so you can see what's been picked up: open · known · fixed · won't fix — only the operator sets it. There's no editing: you can delete your own posts (the post then reads "post removed", so the thread still reads in order; the game asks first, because it can't be undone) and flag anyone else's for the operator to read — nothing happens to a flagged post by itself. Replies don't alert you: open the thread again to read them (the open screen also re-reads itself every half minute). There's a short pause between posts, a longer one between new threads and a cap per hour, so a bad day can't turn into fifty threads — post too soon and you're told to wait.

The boards are also a plain web page at /forum — readable by anyone, no account needed. Posting happens in the game.

Looting — see it all, take what you want

🎒 Move things (on Boss › Gear & money, or under Honest on the building card) opens the looting panel: two lists side by side, with everything within arm's reach on one side and your own pockets on the other.

What counts as within reach: this block's stock — whatever the place sells or makes — its till, its safe, and the boot of the car you arrived in. You see the whole inventory of each, not one item the game picked for you, with the weight, volume and value of every line so you can decide what's worth the space.

Things move both ways and between any two containers you're allowed to touch, one at a time, ten at a time, or as much as will fit. Ask for more than you can carry and it moves what fits and tells you exactly how much it left behind — no arithmetic.

The window stays out of your way. When a robbery or a break-in lets you in, it opens by itself beside the building, not over it. Drag it by its top bar and it stays where you leave it; double-click the bar to put it back beside the building.

Being able to see it is not the same as being able to take it. A shop's stock is behind the counter unless you're actually robbing the place; a safe shows you that it exists and nothing more until you've cracked it. Containers you can't take from still appear, with the reason written on them — knowing there's a safe here and it's shut is worth knowing.

The game is also watching itself

You don't have to file a report for a bad number to get noticed. Every action you take writes one line to a log: what you tried, whether it worked, and — the useful part — the game's own reason when it says no. Ten players told "you can't afford that" is a price problem. A room nobody ever walks into is a signposting problem. Neither shows up in a bug report, because nobody reports a thing they never found.

It records what your character did, not you: no keystrokes, nothing about your device, nothing that leaves our server, and nothing sold to anybody. It rolls over on its own, and deleting your account deletes the character it was tied to. The full account of it is in the Privacy Notice under Gameplay log.

It's read next to what the house-run bosses do. They know where everything is and never get lost in a menu — so when real players do much worse on the same action, the honest conclusion is usually that the game explained it badly, and that gets fixed rather than the payout getting quietly buffed.

Alerts — knowing while you're away

Rookport runs 24/7 and crews travel on timers, so the important things happen whether or not you're watching. The 🔔 Alerts channel is your record of them, newest first:

Press Show on map on a line to open the map on the block where it happened, and Choose which alerts reach you to pick which types reach you: every type can show in the feed, and the serious ones can also email you so an attack finds you when the tab is closed. (Email goes out once the game's mail service is switched on; the in-game feed works today.)

Here or away — Are you still there?

A few rules ask whether you're here or away (offline): whether your boss goes to work by himself, whether he walks home on his own when he comes out of the prison gate, whether you can slip away from a stopped police car, and who counts as online. They all get the same answer:

Getting away — and the cars you can take

Pull a job and you can't just floor it. For a stretch after any crime — a few seconds after a lift, more than a minute after something loud — you can't drive off. Keys, traffic, the crowd. You can always walk immediately, which is slower but instant, and that trade-off is the whole point while the law is converging on the block. Every point of Driving cuts about four seconds off the wait, which is exactly what a wheelman is for.

And Driving decides what's worth stealing. A novice hotwiring a street car gets whatever rustbucket is at the kerb. As Driving climbs, the roster opens up — better sedans, a stolen coupe, a lifted delivery wagon with real cargo room — so the skill pays twice: you get clear faster, and in something better.

Every building has a size

Every business in Rookport is small, medium or large, and a building is one business at a time:

SizeLegal businessesRackets
Smallhouse, restaurant, bar, convenience store, pawn shop, gun shopcrack house, moonshine still, cigarette room
Mediumgarage, workshop, gym, office, dance club, car dealershipgambling den, drug lab, chop shop
Largehotel, casino, warehouse, factorygun works, distillery

The farm, the docks, the bank, the hospital, the police station, the courthouse and the prison are what they are — they never change business.

🔧 Change the business — a refit. On a building you run, the card's 🔧 Change the business section lists every business of its size. Pick one and Refit: you pay for new furniture and a new front — a tenth of what that business would cost to buy (tuning) — from the bank for a legal business, in any money for a racket. The walls stay: the structure, the locks, the safe and what's in it, the till, cameras, traps, a hideout's upgrades, and the goods in the back room (they're yours). The old trade goes: its staff and its help-wanted notice, a dealer's forecourt of cars or a gun shop's rack, its prosperity (a new business starts from scratch). The sign on the map changes with it — for everyone who sees the block; anyone who hasn't looked since remembers the old one.

Not over anybody's head. A house somebody calls home can't be refitted or torn down while he lives there — and if it's your own home, move out first. A family's stronghold stays a stronghold. And a boss who worked at a place that changes business loses the job with the old trade (he's told).

Rebuild the block — another size

To change a building's size, tear it down and put up one of another size. It costs two and a half times what the new building would cost to buy — from the bank for a legal business, any money for a racket — and everything the old place held goes with it: stock, staff, upgrades, production, its structure. But it turns a dead block into the one you actually needed there. (Within the same size, the card sends you to the refit — it's a tenth of the price.)

Building on a ruin. A block someone has levelled with a Destroy op is a cleared lot, and cleared ground is the cheapest way into property in Rookport. If it's yours, you have two choices: rebuild the same place for its structure cost, or use the tear-down control above to put up anything you like on the cleared ground. If it's unowned, buy it — and a ruin is priced as land, not as the business that used to stand there, so it runs about $2,100 in the greenbelt to $4,500 downtown instead of the tens of thousands a working block costs. It earns nothing until you build on it. (You still can't build on virgin open ground — a park is a park.)

The docks — the city's warehouse and its way out

A port is the toughest ground in Rookport and the most expensive deed in it, and once you hold one it's a business in three parts:

Hold it, or lose it. Other bosses come for a dock as they come for a tower (and in a round that has them, so do the AI families): it takes about eight men posted on it to keep it (tuning) — four won't hold the one the gangs go for.

A family can buy one together. Standing on any unowned block, a clan officer can buy it in the family's name straight out of the vault — which is realistically how anyone affords a dock. It then earns for the vault, and every member's guards defend it.

Contest it — you were standing right there

Rookport settles races by first grab wins. But if a rival takes money off a block while you're standing on it — collects the safe, cleans out a till — you don't have to just watch. A ✊ Contest it? card appears with the amount, and one tap calls them out: a real fight, right there. Win and the money comes out of their pocket into yours. Lose and they keep it.

The window is short (about three minutes) and it dies the moment either of you leaves the block — so it's a decision you make on the spot, not a grudge you file. Your own family and treaty allies never raise a claim on you, and pocket change isn't worth a street fight.

Rankings & net worth

The leaderboard ranks living bosses by net worth — what you own, at what it would fetch:

So buying doesn't drop you down the table: pay $82,600 for a tower and you hold an $82,600 tower — and its rent on top. (A car or a gun counts half what you paid: they're worth what you'd get for them.) A family's place counts at its price on the family table the same way. Every earning system feeds it, so there's always a number to move.

The screen (City › Rankings, The Rookport standings) opens with the round's countdown and your own net worth taken apart — bank + cash on you + the rest (stashed cash at half, goods, buildings, cars and gear; or minus a loan-shark debt) — so you can see what moves it. Then the two ladders side by side: the bosses and the families (the top 20 of each). Each one shows your row (or your family's) lit, with the rows above and below folded away — tap Above you / Below you to open them — and a line under it saying how much more you need to pass the next one up. Not in the top 20 yet? Your row says so, and how far you are from 20th. Not in a family? The family ladder shows the top three and a Join or found a family button.

And the screen says what a place on it is worth. Under the two ladders is What placing earns next round — one table, a row per place, a column for the boss and a column for his family: finish 1st and you begin the next round with a full action meter, a large cash seed, a weapon, a vest and a Banker's sedan; 2nd–3rd take nine-tenths of a meter, a medium seed, a weapon and a vest; 4th–10th three-quarters of a meter, a small seed and one piece of gear. Everyone else starts on half a meter and nothing else. The family column says what a family's place puts in its vault, takes off its next stronghold and adds to every member's meter. The band you'd currently take is lit (You are here), and so is your family's (Your family) — outside the top ten, that's the last row. When the round ends, you're told: every surviving boss gets a message saying where he finished and exactly what it earned him — or, outside the top ten, that only the top ten start ahead. It's a fast start, not a lead — it's front-loaded, and it can be robbed off you on day one.

At the bottom are three drawers: Paid intel (below), Recent hits (the graveyard: who was killed, his level and title, by whom and how long ago) and City gangs (the AI families and how many blocks of turf each holds — or one line saying there are none this round).

Tracking a boss needs vision: your own eyes, a camera on a block you own, a lookout you pay. A broker in the Rankings screen's Paid intel drawer sells you around that gate exactly once, for exactly one address:

What you buyPriceWhat you get
A boss's residence$4,000The block he sleeps on and keeps his home safe
A family's ops centre$9,000The block their stronghold, vault and garrison sit on
When a boss walks out of jail$2,500The hour his sentence ends, as of when you bought it: bail, the judge or a doubling move it, and you can buy it again. Refused, free, when he is neither in jail nor on his way there

Three things to know before you spend it:

Everything you've bought shows up on both the Rankings screen and Contacts › People, beside the addresses your own eyes gave you, each with its age and a Show on map button, which opens the map at that block and picks it (on a phone, it switches to the Map).

The hospital

Getting beaten unconscious doesn't kill you — losing to an NPC or a rival's crew, or botching a pickpocket, lands you in the hospital. (The law doesn't hospitalise you any more — a police takedown means jail, which has its own ward.) While you're laid up you're out of action: you can't work, fight, or travel until you're back on your feet. There are three ways out:

You go down where you are, and a wagon comes for you — someone can stop it. Beaten down in the middle of a trip, you stop right there (slumped at the wheel, if you were driving). The city dispatches an ambulance from the nearest hospital to where you lie; until it gets to you, anybody standing over you can finish you. Its crew walk over with a stretcher (in through the door, if you went down indoors), carry you to the wagon and drive you to the hospital — you ride in the back, out of reach of a finishing blow — and you're carried into the ward, where you're discharged when you leave. The hospital card always says where you are: down where you fell (and how far off the wagon is — while you lie there, the danger is the first line under the title), in the back of the ambulance, or in the ward, with your health and the two ways out: Pay for care with its price on the button, and Check out free, which says how long until you're at half health. Each is greyed with its reason when it can't be used. But it's a real vehicle on real streets: a rival can run it off the road or chase it down in his car. Stopped on the way out, nobody collects you: you lie where you fell and your recovery is frozen for about five minutes (paying for private care still works). Stopped on the way back, you're dragged out onto the pavement, still down — which is how a finishing blow finds you. (You can't check out or pay for care from the back of the wagon — wait till you're in the ward.)

Call an ambulance from your phone. With a burner you can call paramedics to you. An ambulance drives out to you from the hospital, the phone tells you about how long it will be, and when it pulls up the paramedics walk over and patch you all the way to full where you are (indoors, they come in through your door; walk off and the wagon follows you). The price is held when you call — any money, the cash on you first; a dispatch fee on top of the care, held for the hospital that sends them — and paid when they treat you; if the call is called off first (you're healed some other way, arrested, taken prisoner or killed, or the wagon is wrecked or stopped on the way) you get it all back. While it's coming the call button says On its way. Crucially, this works even while you're still on your feet (and it saves you waiting it out when you're laid up). Handy after a rough fight you won but limped away from. The paramedics who come are the hospital's own, by name (Paramedics Ernie and Uri patch you up). On a very bad night, with every crew in the city already out, the call is refused and you pay nothing — try again in a minute.

Walk into a hospital on your feet. A hurt boss who was never knocked out can walk in: step inside any hospital and its card offers 🏥 Walk-in care — Treatment (patched to full health at once, $30 a point of health you're missing, any money — the cash on you first — into the hospital's till) or a free bed (you heal at the hospital's rate, 15 HP an hour, for as long as you lie there). In a bed the bar at the bottom has your In a hospital bed card (Details on a phone) with your health climbing, how long until you're full, Pay to finish now and Get up. Getting up, walking out, setting off on a trip, a crime, going down or being jailed ends the bed — you keep what you healed. You're still on your feet in there: the law can still take you.

Your crew, the same way. A man knocked out of a fight heals by himself at the hospital's rate; a man hurt but still standing doesn't heal at all until he's seen to. Every hurt man's card on Crew has Hospital care. For a man hurt but still standing it's Treat (to full, paid by the health he's missing, the same $30 a point) or Hospital bed · free. With him at your side inside a hospital it happens right there; anywhere else it's by phone — he goes to the nearest hospital from where he is, on foot or by car, whichever is quicker (the card says which hospital, how he's going and how long it takes), is treated when he walks in (paid when he sets off) or takes a bed, and makes his way back to you when he's well.

A man knocked out never walks. Out cold, he can't take a step: he moves only in a car with a man on his feet at the wheel — his mates' car, the job's car, or your own car with you at the wheel (you count) — or in the ambulance you call from your phone. Sent somewhere with nobody to drive him, he lies where he is: you're told at once, with the ambulance's button on the line, and his card says Out cold · lies at the block. With neither a car nor an ambulance he lies there and heals at the hospital's rate, then gets up and walks back by himself — to the post he had, or to you. Set off on foot from where he lies at your side and you set him down there; drive off and he rides with you, seated first.

Manage your crew from the phone. The phone also has a Crew fold: it lists your whole roster and what each one is doing right now — at your side, on his way somewhere (where to, and how long), guarding a block (with the coordinates), working a facility, dealing, away on an op, coming back from one, hurt and healing, in a hospital bed, or at your place while you're inside. You can Recall any one of them back to escort you, or hit Recall all crew to call everyone who's out guarding, working or dealing — and anyone waiting at your place — back to you (a hurt man where he lies heals first; the button's count and the answer leave him out, and the answer names the men who were already on their way): the panic button for when you need your muscle around you (a raid warning, a rival on your block). They come from where they are, by the quickest way they have — on foot, or in a car of yours they can use — the nearest first. A man still on his way is not in your fight. The phone says who's coming and when the first and the last will be with you, and how many it couldn't reach. Crew who are away on an op or on their way back from one can't be reached until they're back.

Your contacts. The phone also keeps a searchable Contacts fold of everyone you know — your crew (with what each is doing right now, and a Recall for any out on a duty), your stationed lookouts (and which block each watches), and the manager running every legal front you own. Type a name or a role in the search box to filter, and hit Locate on anyone to jump the map straight to their block — handy for finding where your muscle, your eyes, or your businesses are across the city.

The hospital is the floor — nothing an NPC or the law does can kill you outright. The only way to actually die is a rival player landing the finishing blow while you're already down (below).

Death & the graveyard

Death is players-only: if a rival catches you already wounded on their tile and lands a finishing blow, your boss is gone — recorded in the graveyard with an obituary (name, title, level, cause, killer, place and date). Skills and levels only persist while you're alive, so surviving compounds. A downed boss is finished off only at arms length (3 m), whatever you are holding: a pistol that reached him on his feet does not reach him on the ground, so Finish walks you over to stand above him first. And only once his health actually ran out: a boss who gave up in a fight with nobody there to take him is wounded too, but he yielded, and you can't finish a man who yielded. (Lose to the city itself — NPCs or a botched job — and you go to the hospital; get taken by the law and it's jail. Neither is the grave.)

A man who goes down leaves everything where he fell. There's no payout for the kill — there's a body on the pavement, and you go through it yourself. Select it in the On the ground list and hit Go through him: his dirty (street) cash, everything he was carrying, his stash and the gear he was wearing all sit in the ordinary looting panel, the same one a shop's shelves use. Take what your pockets and your boot will hold — nothing spoils and nothing is thrown away, so what won't fit stays on him and you can come back for the rest. His clean/banked money and anything inside his buildings are not on the body; those you'd have to take separately.

You don't have to kill him first. A rival who's been beaten down but not finished is lootable exactly the same way — he's flat on his back and in no position to argue. Select him and his card opens with the choice spelled out at the top — finish him (for good: no roll, 15 actions, a lot of heat; the graveyard names you, and the police come if somebody on the block saw it), go through him (free, no heat, nobody calls — but anyone watching the block sees you at it) or leave him (the ambulance takes him to the hospital and he heals) — with the buttons in their groups below; the finishing blow always asks first. That window closes the moment the ambulance reaches him — his card counts down to it while the wagon is on its way, or says no wagon is on the road for him yet — which is one more reason to know where the wagon is: run it off the road on its way out and nobody's collecting him for a good while longer. Once the wagon has him, his card says so and offers Select the ambulance.

And his car is still at the kerb. Whatever he drove there stays parked where he fell — it shows on the map, you can open its boot and empty it, or you can simply take the car and go. Boosting a downed man's ride needs no Driving skill at all (his keys are on the body), though it still costs you the actions, the heat, and whoever's watching picking up a telephone.

The respawn window — your next boss arrives ~24 hours later. A permanent death opens a respawn window on your account (about 24 real hours — shortened while the game is in preview). While it runs, the game shows your fallen boss's obituary instead of the city: who killed him, where and when, a live countdown, what is gone for good (the bank, your gear, your crew, the car, your level, your family membership), your buildings at risk, and what lies on the body. Under it you can already pick the next boss's name; the Make your next boss button wakes up when the countdown ends. Meanwhile the dead boss's empire sits exposed — and so does his body: for that whole day the pavement he died on is worth going back to, for you or for anyone else who hears about it. Any rival can also seize the fallen buildings at a discount during the window. When the clock runs out, you name a new boss and start over — fresh level, fresh stats — and whatever property nobody seized passes to your new character: the one inheritance from the old life. The money still on the old boss when the new one arrives — his bank, whatever nobody took off the body, the cash in his boots and his locker, his men's pockets — goes to the city's coffers, not to you. (There's no paying to come back sooner — the wait is the price of dying.)

Rounds & fresh starts

Rookport is played in rounds of a fixed length. A countdown in the top bar shows which round you're in and how long is left ("Round 1 · ends in 12d 4h").

When a round ends, the world resets — and this is the heart of what makes your character matter:

Roadmap — planned features

These are designed and queued, not yet in the game:

Raids & operations — send crew (and cars) to hit a target tile, on the spot or automated in advance so it runs while you're offline: attack a building from outside with your car as cover, or rush in; defenders with guns shoot back; you haul off cash and any items you have room to carry. Crew fight, carry gear, and go down wounded and heal; only a boss can finish a man. Heat is shared across your whole gang.

Defense — garrisoned crew auto-defend your tiles even while you're away, and when you're online an inbound raid now warns you with a live countdown so you can rush crew to the block and reinforce the garrison before it lands. High-heat gangs draw automated police SWAT raids. (Deeper ways to spy on rivals' plans come later.)

Deeper skills — Driving and Stealth grow beyond their current effects, and the rest of the skill tree arrives. Driving will also unlock higher-tier vehicles you can steal as you level and shorten the getaway delay after a crime. Stealth will lower your chance of being caught pickpocketing, cut the heat you gain on every criminal action, and make your heat cool off faster on its own. New skills join them — Killer, Tough-as-nails, Leadership, Relation, Dealer, Spying, Security technician, Arsonist, Heavy weapon — each a different way to build your boss.

Recruits as full characters — crew become near-players. Each has a level (1–10, shown on their card — and your boss's level is shown too), the same primary stats and skills you have, and a quality tier: common, rare, epic, legendary. Tier scales their power against a player — common is ×0.7, rare ×0.85, epic equal, legendary ×1.2 — and drives their hire fee and daily wage. Higher tiers are rarer to find and cost far more, and you can never hire someone above your own level. Each block shows 1–2 recruits that fit the place (a gym tough is stronger and higher-level; a park face is low). Better tier/level crew carry better gear — and since every person in the world is real, you can beat and loot them instead of hiring, earning XP for every win (more for tougher fights).

A living map (more of it) — the map is now fully click-to-reach: pickpocket or attack a street NPC straight from its dot, carjack a car driving right past you by clicking it, right-click anywhere to walk or travel there, and click any recruit venue from across the city to preview who's drinking there and route straight over to hire (see Combat, Vehicles and Crew above).

A living economy (more of it) — real shelves, real producers, visible robbable delivery trucks and shortage pricing are all live (see Trading above), and gear and weapons are now part of the same chain rather than appearing on a rack from nowhere. Every good, crop and weapon in the game — where it is made, where it sells, and how it travels — is listed on the goods manifest, which is built from the game's own tables each time you open it. Coming next: the docks import market as the contested top of the supply chain, trucks driving proper road lanes, and goods flows for the rest of the city's venues (hotels, casinos, offices).

Evolving portraits for NPCs & bosses — recruits and crew now carry hand-drawn tier portraits that advance as they rank up; still to come is that same treatment for street NPCs and every boss avatar (made from a description or by uploading your own photo to be "gangsterified" into the house style).

Longer-horizon backlog — deeper on-foot/vehicle movement, looting parked cars, playing as a cop, and a UI overhaul.

Dev cheats (prototype only)

While Rookport is in preview, cheat endpoints help testing (disabled for real rounds):

The Cheats tab only appears when the server has actually enabled them for you. If it is ever reachable and the controls are not connected, it says so at the top and greys them out, rather than showing buttons that quietly do nothing.

Feature-complete as of the economy/crew rework (clean/dirty money, crew duties + promotion, legal businesses + laundering). This guide is updated as the game grows.

Last updated 2026-10-17