Insider Trading

The smartest thing here is that my own orders move the price, and everything worth praising follows from that. Most deckbuilders keep their economy frozen: a card costs what the card costs, and the only real variable is the draw. This one puts a reactive market underneath the deck, so the size and timing of a position matter as much as the position itself. Load up too aggressively on a stock you have correctly identified as a winner and you shove your own entry past the point where the trade pays off. That is a genuine way to lose a run, not flavour text, and it is exactly the decision layer I keep hoping somebody will bolt onto this genre. The loop is run-based roguelike deckbuilding, with a trading floor sitting where the shop and the fight usually sit. You accumulate perks, the perks talk to each other, and the winning runs are the ones where three or four of them form a loop the market cannot punish fast enough. That is the standard Slay the Spire skeleton and Naiive have not tried to disguise it. What they added is a second axis. In an ordinary deckbuilder the correct play is a function of your hand. Here it is a function of your hand, your holdings, your available cash, and what your last few trades already did to the board. Two identical hands two turns apart are not the same hand. It took me about three runs to stop reading cards in isolation and start reading them against the ticker, and that click is where the Very Positive standing comes from. If the phrase insider trading makes you assume there is finance homework attached, ignore the instinct. Nothing here expects you to know what a put option is. The systems are closed and legible, expressed in whole numbers you can hold in your head, and the game hands you the levers rather than assuming you arrived with a textbook. The support options back that up. Difficulty is adjustable instead of a single fixed curve, you can save at any point rather than committing to a run in one sitting, and there is a playable-without-timed-input setting, which tells you the pressure comes from decisions and not from a clock. Text size scaling, colour alternatives and a mouse-only scheme are all in the build, and full controller support (DualSense and DualShock included) means it reads fine on a handheld from the couch. For a small February 2026 indie release, that is a more considered accessibility list than plenty of studios ten times the size ship. The gaps are the ones you would predict at this scale. No Workshop support, no mod tools anywhere in the feature list, and for a systems game built on a randomised perk pool that is the ceiling I worry about most. Deckbuilders live or die on how long their content pool holds up, and the ones with real staying power almost always have a community feeding them new cards years later. It is single-player only, with no daily run or leaderboard listed, so once you have solved the market you are competing against yourself and nobody else. And roughly one reviewer in five is unhappy, which in a variance-heavy genre usually means runs that die because the offer sequence never handed over a synergy rather than because you misplayed. I have had those runs. The restart costs you nothing but a click, which takes some of the sting out of it, but it does not remove it. Buy it if you like the deckbuilder loop and have started finding the usual version a bit too solvable, and you want a second variable that actively pushes back on your plan. It slots neatly into the gaps where a grand strategy campaign will not fit, and I mean that as a compliment. Skip it if what you actually want is the sprawl, the spreadsheets and the mod scene of a full economic sim, because this is a tight closed box and it is not pretending otherwise.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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