God Candle

God Candle is a real-time trading roguelite. You start with a $1,000,000 book and have ten trading days to retire, with each day lasting 45 seconds. Go long or short, use leverage and meet the closing-bell target; if you fail, the margin clerk shuts down your desk.

Trading modes

Alongside the ten-day run, God Candle has several other ways to trade:

• Prediction Pit: In the ten-day run and Daily Gauntlet, take three YES/NO contracts on each day’s simulated tape. The desk’s market maker prices each contract live, and its price represents the pit’s odds. A winning share pays $1 of fictional run cash. Predict whether a ticker closes above its open or touches an upper or lower barrier; touch contracts settle as soon as the barrier prints, and payouts count toward the closing bell. Risk is defined, with no margin call, but each lot has a spread, you can trade five lots a day, trading halts at 3:30, and there are no quotes on boss days. The maker uses only past tape and conditions announced at the open, so headlines and the economic calendar can inform your decisions.
• Hedge Desk: Trade two linked tickers from a shared $1M margin book across three escalating sessions. Choose $NVDA / $QQQ, $SPY / $GLD or $GME / $AMC, and trade both legs long or short. Finish each session above its target while staying deployed at 1.5× gross for 70% of the session. A hedge earns margin credit while the link holds; the desk wire warns when it is about to break. It also calls single-name shocks, macro shocks, rotations and funding squeezes seconds ahead, showing how a 5% move would affect your book but not its direction. A hedge covers macro shocks, not single-name shocks, and a rotation doubles the effect. Funding squeezes cancel hedge credit and lower the margin cap; if you do not trim in time, the desk sells for you. After each mandate, keep one of six desk policies, then review both legs and the observed link in Tape Review.
• Rival Tape: Compete in single-player against a rival who trades the same prices using a strategy you can learn and exploit. Each open resets both books to $1M, and the highest combined return over three sessions wins. Track the live gap, positioning, drawdown and rival executions; after the bell, review both traders’ entries and exits, jump to the largest gap swing or your highest exposure, and rematch the exact tape with a different decision. You can generate a versioned challenge code for a rival, market circuit and risk tier. Friends who own God Candle can load it and trade the same scenario offline. Export a local results card with returns and drawdown. These are asynchronous challenges, not online multiplayer or verified player ghosts.
• Market Maker: Quote both sides of the tape, capture the spread and manage the inventory left by each fill. Tighten quotes for flow, widen them for chaos, shift them to work back to flat, and flatten before toxic flow overwhelms you. Each run has five escalating sessions of about 40 seconds, from a calm opening book to a liquidity crisis, with nine desk upgrades to build between bells.

Prediction Pit uses fictional money only: there is no real money, purchasing, cash-out or real-world events.

The market

Each morning, choose a ticker from a shortlist of ten, with volatility and behavior readouts ranging from sleepy $GLD to chaotic $GME. Runs draw from nine market-event bosses: Earnings Day, FOMC, Squeeze Watch, Flash Crash, Melt-Up, Quad Witching, Circuit Breaker, OPEX Pin and The Bear. Ten daily market conditions add further changes, including Volatility Storm, Algo Chop, Data Blackout, Gamma Ramp and Zero Commission Day.

Special sessions change your objectives: stay within the risk committee’s drawdown limit, profit on both sides of a whipsaw, make three bullets count or trade the closing auction. Boss order, targets and tickers are shuffled or rerolled, and the scheduler avoids serving the same mandate or condition on consecutive days, so runs differ.

You can draw stop orders on the chart, then trim, flip or scale positions while the tape is live. Each ticker has a hidden good, mid or bad book, which you infer from noisy signals relative to its sector; some signals are cooked. Earnings follow guidance rather than the EPS print, so a beat can send a ticker down and a miss can send it up. Optional side contracts are available each morning and pay at the bell, but are never mandatory.

Traders and upgrades

Choose from four classes, each with an exclusive kit of two powers: The Chad uses 5x leverage, The Quant sees six ticks into the future, The Cockroach refuses to die, and The Insider gets a free tip line that rings four times a day. Across runs, draft one of three desk tools after each bell, then shop for relics and upgrades. Street Cred lets you permanently install tools for use from day one in future runs.

There are 29 relics and 16 powers. Relics can reward scalping, holding through volatility or hot streaks, and some activate when paired with the right others. You can also print the GOD CANDLE, a divine vertical candle that shakes the screen straight into your position.

During the trading day, 25 floor events present consequential choices: take a bribe, buy a hot tip, ride a pump or put cash into real estate, wine or art. Their results arrive the next day and can pay off or detonate. Rare gold JACKPOT and red DISASTER events can make or end a run.

Practice and review

A guided Practice Desk lets you learn long and short trades, closing positions and leverage at your own pace. Slow the live tape to 0.5x or freeze the clock to study the chart and your tools. The Quant’s passive foresight shows six ticks, and each run ends with a target-and-equity debrief and a direct retry using the same strategy.

After each closing bell, review the day’s candles, your entries and exits, and its best move. A Desk Note identifies what decided the session, such as a margin call, a returned winner, a trend you fought or fees that erased gains. Your fills appear on the live chart as you trade, and the results screen turns the clearest lesson from a lost run into something to try next. Standard and Rival Desk show entry exposure, entry fees and the raw loss from a 1% adverse price move; open positions show current exposure and an estimated margin line. You can preview risk while paused, but the readout does not place a stop order.

Challenges and records

The Daily Gauntlet gives everyone the same seeded market each day. You can also keep trading in Endless mode after the ten-day run, or raise the difficulty through four levels from Rookie to Prop Desk and then Ascension. The game includes 33 achievements, Career records for each class, a Hall of Fame, a leaderboard and a Trophy Room with ten chart skins bought with Street Cred.

Additional features

The game has a procedurally generated synth soundtrack and per-action sound effects synthesized in-engine. It includes a colorblind palette, UI scaling, and toggles for screen shake, extra effects and CRT scanlines.

An optional Market Research panel under Desk & Settings opens supported U.S. tickers in Google Finance through Steam Overlay, or in your system browser outside Steam. It uses a limited local reference table for selected Nasdaq and NYSE listings; Google Finance prices and market data do not appear in the game. Play modes and the learning shortcut are on the title menu, while Research, Trophy Room, leaderboard, career records, controls and settings are grouped under Desk & Settings.