Big Chair

The pitch

Three lives, one chair. Play a footballer, a rock star, or a founder — every card is a choice, every match is a flick, and every run can end in one swipe.

Why I’m making it

Reigns proved that a whole kingdom can be governed with one thumb. I wanted to apply that same brutal elegance to something more personal: a career. Everyone knows the arc — the young talent, the rise, the temptations, the fall or the throne. It’s the oldest story there is, and it maps perfectly onto a roguelite: no two careers play out the same, and death (retirement, burnout, scandal) is just the start of the next run.

The twist that makes it mine: the big moments aren’t cards. When your striker steps up in the cup final, you don’t read about it — you flick the shot yourself. When your band plays the arena, your timing decides the review. Decision meets execution.

How I’m building it

Big Chair is React + TypeScript + Vite with Tailwind CSS for the interface and Framer Motion driving the card physics — the swipe, the snap-back, the commit all have to feel exactly like flicking through a deck. The flick mini-games run on a lightweight canvas layer that shares its input model with the cards, so the whole game stays one-thumb, portrait, played anywhere.

Careers are data: each one is a deck of authored cards plus meters (form, fame, money, sanity) with tier gates in between. The engine doesn’t care if you’re a footballer or a founder, which is what makes three careers — and eventually more — feasible for one developer. Capacitor wraps it for iOS, Firebase tracks balance data from playtests, and the game is validated end-to-end with Zod schemas so authored content can’t silently break a run.

Follow the build in the devlog.