Groober

Groober is a satirical Reigns-like about running a taxi app’s algorithm. You were built to squeeze out the maximum, but balancing the demands on the service is not easy: every bar has two deadly extremes, with zero and one hundred both leading to failure.

Four competing factions

The owners want more money and may eventually want your job. The regulator wants you switched off, sometimes for good reason. Passengers complain, blackmail you and may give birth in the back seat. Drivers are your workforce, spending twelve hours behind the wheel with no reason to like you.

Set the fares

You do not have a price dial. Instead, you set a base fare across five steps, from DUMPING to ROBBERY, and use multipliers for rain, commission, unpaid waiting, district, loyalty and a passenger’s battery level. Each multiplier can increase revenue while affecting its own faction.

Every active multiplier builds a red attention bar. When it fills, a scandal named after that multiplier occurs; disabled multipliers cool down. You turn on the dirty tactics to meet the plan, then switch them off before they cause trouble.

Cities and progression

There are six cities, from a dying factory town to head office. Meeting a plan moves you up; missing it rolls you back, and some of you goes missing. Between cities, a weight shop offers perks that change your character rather than your numbers.

Cards, characters and endings

The game includes around 200 cards and 50 characters, whose arcs run across the whole game. Three minigames cover a downpour, a payment outage and taking over the wheel. There are five endings, including one hidden ending that requires you to do something algorithms normally refuse to do. A living log remembers everything you did.