A day, in four moves
It's all about the spread.
Every borough rolls its own prices every day. You're the one carrying things between them.
Fill the coat
Spend everything you've got on whatever's cheap here. A hundred pockets, a gun takes five. A guy in a doorway sells bigger coats, if you've got the cash when he asks.
Take the subway
Bronx, Ghetto, Central Park, Manhattan, Coney Island, Brooklyn. Each ride is a day, and each day the loan grows by a tenth and the market rolls again.
Find the spike
"Cops made a big bust — prices are outrageous!" That's a price at four times normal. Crashed prices show green, spikes amber, so you can read the board from across the room.
See the shark
He's in the Bronx, and the debt compounds daily — pay it down early or it eats the month. The bank next door pays five percent and muggers can't reach it.
The app
A market board, cash-register green.
Cash, debt, health and the day across the top; the market down the middle, with what you hold beside each price; the subway at the bottom. Crashes and spikes are colored, and the day's log scrolls underneath so you know what just happened to you.
A game in progress is saved when you quit and picked up on whichever device you open next; the ten best runs follow you too.
Everything that can go wrong
The cops, the muggers, the market.
- The law
Officer Hardass
He and his deputies turn up when you're carrying — more of them as the month goes on. Run, or fight if you bought that gun.
- The street
Muggers
Ten to thirty percent of whatever's in your pocket. Cash in the bank is cash they can't touch.
- The market
Busts and floods
A bust sends a price to four or five times normal; a flooded market divides it. Both are the best thing that can happen, if you're on the right side.
- Doorways
Guns and coats
A .38 Special, a Ruger, a Saturday Night Special — and a bigger coat, for a price. Each offer comes once.
- The clinic
The doctor
Takes a beating to bring you to her, takes cash to patch you up, and doesn't ask questions.
- The subway
Found goods
Now and then someone leaves a coat on the train with something in the pockets. Not everything that happens is bad.
Privacy
It's a game. It stays one.
- No account, no sign-in, no ads, nothing to buy.
- Your best runs and the game in progress live on your devices and in your own iCloud, nowhere else.
- The Mac app's daily update check and the downloads are counted the way any web server counts requests — no identifier, no tracking.
Thirty days. Go.
It's free. The Mac app downloads below; the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro versions are built and on their way to the App Store.
Download Dope Wars for MacmacOS 14+ · Apple silicon & Intel · signed and notarized · about 5 MB
Is it the same game as the old one?
Same setup — $2,000, $5,500 owed, thirty days, six boroughs, eight goods with the classic price bands, the loan shark, the bank, the cops, the muggers. It looks like it belongs on a modern Mac, but the game underneath is the one from the PDA days.
What's the score?
Your net worth when the month ends: cash plus the bank, minus the debt. The ten best runs are kept, and synced to your other devices through iCloud. Die, and the run scores zero.
Is it safe to install?
It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a double-click — no right-click-to-open workaround.
How do updates work?
The Mac app checks once a day and offers an update when there is one; you can also pick Check for Updates… from the app menu. Every update is cryptographically signed.
Something's wrong, or you have an idea?
Get in touch — say which app and version, and what happened. What the app does and doesn't collect is on the privacy page.
Built with AI
I built Dope Wars with heavy use of AI coding tools.
Saying so seems more useful than leaving you to guess.