< MUSECADE GAME 007
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Pixel art: a business owner at night in a loft office facing four glowing monitors with charts that disagree, shipping boxes stacked high and a yellow sponge on the desk.
GAME 007

BLACK FRIDAY

A DTC SATIRE

#blackfriday
PLAYERS
1
TIME
45–75 MIN
GENRE
SATIRE · BUSINESS · PG-13
ENDINGS
11
DICE
D20, LIGHT RULES
DIFFICULTY
???

THE BRIEF

It's October. You run Wrung, a direct-to-consumer brand that sells very good kitchen sponges. $400K a month. A 2.1 MER. Fourteen apps on the store, and one line item, $6,400 a month, that nobody can explain.

Four dashboards report four different numbers for yesterday. The group chat says a bull run is coming. It says that every October.

42 DAYS TO BLACK FRIDAY.

CPMS ARE GOING UP. CVR IS GOING DOWN.

YOUR HAIR IS FALLING OUT.

Fly to the industry's biggest conference. Survive an expo hall of SaaS sellers who treat you like royalty. Sit at the brand owners' steakhouse table. Get grilled on a live podcast next to a guru with a method named after a ratio. The timeline is at war over ad account structure. The ad platform keeps turning features on by itself. Nobody can explain the $6,400 line item, and nobody ever will. Everyone is looking for the CPM lever. You need a plan that survives contribution margin, not a thread. And on Thanksgiving afternoon, the ad platform's reporting goes dark. The ads keep spending. You fly the biggest weekend of the year blind.

Black Friday is satire. Every person, brand, agency, fund, podcast and tool in it is fictional, a parody of archetypes rather than of anyone real. Any resemblance to real people or companies is coincidental.

WHAT DID YOU COME UP THROUGH?

Every CEO came up through something. It changes what you notice and what you can pull off. Founders collect Receipts. Everyone gets one post per act: write it yourself, roll for reach, and go viral for exactly the wrong reason.

  • FOUNDERYou started it in your kitchen. Vendors bow.
  • MEDIA BUYERSix years in the ad account. You know what moved.
  • OPERATORFinance and ops. You read the P&L for fun.
  • CREATIVEYou made the ads before you ran the company.

INSERT CARTRIDGE

1. LOAD MUSECADE

Go to lorenzen.ai/musecade/musecade.md and follow the instructions.

2. SUMMON

#blackfriday

3. SURVIVE Q4

Muse runs the season. Find the one number you can trust, say no to the pitches, and make it to Cyber Monday with your margin, your team and some of your hair.

ACHIEVEMENTS

  • NO NEW TOOLSReach Black Friday without buying any software.
  • LEAN STACKCut everything you can't explain.
  • THE WHOLE TEAMNobody quits or gets poached.
  • NO SITEWIDENever run a sitewide discount.
  • NEVER POSTED THE SCREENSHOTYou know the one.
  • NEVER STARTED A PODCASTThey will ask. Four times.
  • ? ? ? ? ?Seven more achievements are hidden.

HIGH SCORES · BLACK FRIDAY

READING HIGH SCORES…

ALL TIME · real runs only · † ran out of cash

ADVENTURES PLAYED
—
PLAYERS SURVIVED
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HIGH SCORE
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RAREST ENDING
—

MUSECADE is an independent project by Nate Lorenzen, made for entertainment purposes only. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Meta Platforms, Inc., Muse, or any Meta product or service. "Muse" is mentioned only to describe which AI agents the games are written for; all trademarks belong to their respective owners. All games are works of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, organizations or events is coincidental.