Startups Game

When the Market Moves, Everyone Has to React

One card placed in the wrong spot can hand a rival the lead. One company you've been quietly accumulating suddenly becomes the table's obsession, and the careful position you've been building shifts in an instant. That tension — of watching, waiting, and knowing when to act — is what makes Startups so compelling for such a small package.

What Is Startups?

From Oink Games, the Japanese publisher celebrated for delivering genuinely clever gameplay in boxes small enough to slip into a pocket, Startups drops players into the volatile world of tech investment. A handful of emerging companies are competing for dominance, and each player is quietly backing their favourites — buying shares, seeding the public market, and keeping a close eye on what everyone else is collecting.

Each round, cards are drafted and distributed across three destinations: your private hand, the face-up public market, or buried out of play entirely. That three-way decision is where the game lives. Hoard too much privately and you risk missing out on controlling the public narrative. Flood the market and you might be handing your rivals exactly what they need. The game ends when every company is fully funded, and the investors holding the most shares in the highest-valued firms collect the biggest returns. The mechanics are clean and quick to explain, but a single well-read move in the final rounds can overturn the entire standings.

Who Should Play It?

Startups plays three to seven players and wraps up in thirty to forty-five minutes — a strong choice for game nights where you want real strategic engagement without a lengthy commitment. It's light-to-medium in complexity: the rules are easy enough to cover in five minutes, but there's enough bluffing, reading the table, and adaptive decision-making to keep seasoned players genuinely invested. Groups who enjoy social deduction or negotiation games will find a natural home here, and it works equally well as a sharp opener, a between-rounds filler, or a standalone evening game for the right crowd. The recommended count of five or six players is where the interaction really crackles.

Features & Highlights

True to Oink's design philosophy, everything here is compact and considered. The card stock is sturdy, the iconography is clean and immediately readable, and the minimalist graphic design suits the Silicon Valley theme without feeling gimmicky. There's no wasted space — the box contains exactly what the game needs and nothing it doesn't. If you've played Deep Sea Adventure or Insider, you already know what Oink delivers: a small footprint, a surprising amount of depth, and a production quality that punches well above its size.

Specifications