Business Baron
Run a British business month by month. Free to play with five business types and no time limit, or £19.99 for the full game. Not out yet. Join the waitlist.
Start with a café in Manchester or a plumbing round in Wrexham. Meet the VAT threshold, hire your first employee, and find out what a bad January does to a business that looked fine in December.
You pick a trade, a town and a year, and then it is your problem
A café in Manchester. A plumbing round in Wrexham. A haulage yard in Hull in 1974. There are 141 business types and 91 towns and cities to put one in, across four nations that do not share a rulebook. The year you start in can be any year from 1930 onwards, and businesses arrive when history does: nobody opens a launderette before 1949 or an ITV company before 1955.
Then the game gives you a bank account, a founder with a life outside work, and a month.
A turn is a month. That is the whole clock, and it is why this works. A month is long enough for a decision to have a consequence, and short enough that you do not see the consequence coming.
The game is about cash, not growth
Most management games are about getting bigger. This one is about staying solvent while you do it.
You can trade well all year, show a profit on paper, and still be short in February. The VAT quarter and the Corporation Tax payment land in the same eight weeks. Your biggest customer pays in ninety days and your supplier wants thirty. Profit is an opinion. The bank balance is a fact, and your bank manager has one in front of him.
That gap is the whole game. Every system in it feeds the same question: can you pay what you owe on the day you owe it.
The rules are British, real, and dated to the month
Business Baron carries real headline UK tax rules for every year from 1930/31, with later years projected from legislated changes. This is not set dressing. VAT does not exist before April 1973, because it did not; before it there is Purchase Tax, and in the war Excess Profits Tax. Until 15 February 1971 every price is in pounds, shillings and pence. Stamp duty is a slab tax until December 2014, so a house at £250,001 pays three times the tax of one at £250,000. If your founder lives in Scotland, Scottish income tax bands apply to them. Land and Buildings Transaction Tax from April 2015 in Scotland, Land Transaction Tax from April 2018 in Wales.
Employment works the same way. Dismissals, redundancies, grievances, minimum wage enforcement and right to work checks all run against the law in force that month. A tribunal is then lived out as obligations arriving over a year, not settled with one dice roll.
Every trade is simulated as that trade
A haulier is not a café with different pictures. Capacity is vehicles, crewed by drivers, each with an annual test and a fuel bill, and behind all of it an operator licence the traffic commissioner can curtail. Running a lorry past its test is cheap until the roadside check.
A butcher lives on stock instead. Order lean and you run out on a good week. Order generously and you throw money in the bin, which is what makes the Christmas peak a decision rather than a bonus.
Research is a real tree, industry specific and era gated, with relief that did not exist at all before April 2000. Marketing is campaigns with a brief, a budget, a channel mix and a target, and attribution that misleads you in the way real attribution misleads you.
An hour of this is mostly reading and deciding
You open the inbox. Your accountant has looked at the rolling twelve-month turnover and thinks you are about to cross the VAT threshold. A supplier has shortened your terms. Somebody has applied for the job you advertised and wants more than you meant to pay.
You look at the thirteen week cash flow, which is the number that stops British businesses dying. You pick the two of those three things you can afford. You advance the month.
Then an inspector arrives unannounced and asks for the records you have actually been keeping, and the grade that follows is public. Or nothing happens at all and you get a quiet month, which is the month to spend on whatever is going to bite you in March.
It arrives as letters from people who want something
Nothing is narrated. Everything comes as a letter with a sender, a role and a date: a named accountant, a bank manager with a tenure and a risk appetite and a memory of how you have behaved, HMRC, the council, a local paper that remembers last year.
Brand trust is three things rather than one. Competence is whether it works, integrity is whether you are honest, care is how you treat people. Competence recovers fastest and care slowest, because care takes months of consistent behaviour to build and one afternoon to lose.
It does not end, and it remembers what you did
A career passes from one generation to the next. When a founder hands over, the business goes on with whoever takes it, and so does the game. Play never has to stop. Bankruptcy is a severe setback, and it is not the end either.
What the game keeps is the log of what you actually did, not just your closing balance. A summary built from final figures says the same thing about everyone who reached the same number. One built from decisions can say that you hired forty people and never once cut a price.
There is a public leaderboard for dynasty net worth, jobs created and the best company sale, with scores for each of the 103 scenarios alongside. Every player has a profile.
The simulation is deterministic. The same seed and the same actions produce the same game, and a replay is a file you can hand to somebody else.
Free to play, with no time limit
Business Baron is free to play with five business types: Café & Coffee Shop, Hair & Beauty Salon, Plumber & Heating Engineer, E-commerce, and Pub & Bar. There is no time limit. It is the real game with a narrower choice of business, running on the same engine as everything else.
£19.99 for the full game
The full game costs £19.99. One payment, no subscription. It opens every business type outside the add-on tracks and the specialist trades: 72 more, which makes 77 in all. Restaurants, takeaways, fine dining, nightclubs, shops, wholesale, logistics, the trades, farming, manufacturing, education, professional services, fitness and food producers are all in it, and so are the trades of the 1930s to the 1960s: the coal merchant, the milk round, the laundry and the launderette, the forge, the mill, the pottery, the printer and the pawnbroker.
Six tracks, £5.99 each
A track adds a themed set of business types to the full game, and needs the full game to work.
- Property & Construction. Construction, property and lettings, scaffolding, housebuilding, estate agency, chartered surveyors, architecture and self storage.
- Hotels & Leisure. Hotels and B&Bs, guest houses, holiday parks and campsites, a travel agency, golf and padel clubs, a wedding venue, an independent cinema, an escape room and an events company.
- Health & Care. A private clinic, care services, dental, physiotherapy, a care home, a veterinary practice, opticians and a counselling and therapy practice.
- Technology & Media. Software, IT support, games and app studios, an AI consultancy, cybersecurity, creative and web design agencies, photography, video production, a recording studio, a local newspaper and a podcast studio.
- Heritage High Street. A tea room, a tobacconist, an ironmonger, a draper, a cobbler, a tailor, a milliner, a fishmonger, a greengrocer, a pie and mash shop, a department store, a coffee bar and a record shop.
- Seaside & Leisure. A dance hall, a lido, a holiday camp, a seaside boarding house, a bingo hall, an amusement arcade, a ten-pin bowling alley and a roller skating rink.
Nothing you can buy changes how the simulation behaves. A track adds businesses. The rules stay the rules.
25 specialist trades, £9.99 each
A specialist trade is a whole industry of its own, sold one at a time on top of the full game: a railway operator, an airline, a water company, a colliery, an aircraft maker, an ITV franchise, a building society. Nobody buying a bus network wants a pipeline thrown in, so they are not bundled.
That makes 141 business types in all: 5 free, 72 more with the full game, 60 in the six tracks and 25 specialist trades.
103 scenarios
A scenario is the short form: a fixed seed, a fixed problem and a score you can compare with other attempts. 42 are free for everybody. The other 61 are sold one at a time at £2.99 and are played in the full game.
It is built, and it is not out yet
Business Baron is finished. What is not finished is everything around it: code signing, notarisation, the browser build and the shop behind it. It runs in the web browser, with desktop builds to follow. There is no date, so there is a waitlist rather than a buy button.
Tracks
- Property & Construction Track: Build it, sell it, let it. Housebuilding, scaffolding, estate agency, surveying, architecture and self storage, with the planning, the chains and the retention that come with them.
- Hotels & Leisure Track: Rooms, courts, screens and weddings. Hotels, guest houses, holiday parks, golf and padel clubs, cinemas, escape rooms and the events trade.
- Health & Care Track: Regulated, staffed and inspected. Clinics, dental and physio practices, vets, opticians, care services and a care home.
- Technology & Media Track: Software, studios and the people who make things for screens. SaaS, IT support, games and app studios, cybersecurity, agencies, photography, video, podcasts and a local paper.
- Heritage High Street Track: The shops a town was built around. Tea rooms, tobacconists, ironmongers, drapers, cobblers, tailors, milliners, fishmongers and greengrocers, pie and mash, a department store, a coffee bar and a record shop, each open in the decades it belongs to.
- Seaside & Leisure Track: A week by the sea and a night out in town. Dance halls, lidos, holiday camps, boarding houses, bingo, arcades, bowling and roller rinks, open for the season and at the mercy of the weather.
Questions
Is it free?
Yes. Business Baron is free to play with five business types: Café & Coffee Shop, Hair & Beauty Salon, Plumber & Heating Engineer, E-commerce, and Pub & Bar. There is no time limit. It is the real game with a narrower choice of business, not a cut-down version of the simulation.
What does the full game add?
£19.99 buys the full game. It opens every business type outside the six tracks and the specialist trades, 72 more, which makes 77 in all. Restaurants, takeaways, nightclubs, shops, wholesale, logistics, the trades, farming, manufacturing, education, professional services, fitness and food producers are all in it.
What are tracks, and do I need the full game for them?
A track adds a themed set of business types: Property & Construction, Hotels & Leisure, Health & Care, Technology & Media, Heritage High Street, or Seaside & Leisure. Each costs £5.99. Yes, you need the full game: a track adds to it and does not work on its own.
Is there a subscription?
No. The full game is one payment of £19.99, each track is a single payment of £5.99, each specialist trade £9.99 and each paid scenario £2.99. Nothing you can buy changes how the simulation behaves.
Does it ever end?
No. A career passes from one generation to the next through succession, and play never has to stop. Bankruptcy is a severe setback rather than the end. The 103 scenarios are the short form: a fixed seed, a fixed problem and a score you can compare with other attempts.
Can I play it in a browser?
Yes. That is how it runs, and it is the reason the engine was built without a desktop framework around it. Desktop builds for macOS, Windows and Linux follow later, and one purchase will cover all of them.
Is it out yet?
No, and we are not giving a date. The game is built and the work left is the unglamorous part: code signing, notarisation, the browser build and the shop behind it. Join the waitlist and you will hear on the day it opens, and not before.
Do my saves carry between the browser and the desktop?
Yes. Saves live with your account. Sign the desktop game in from its Settings, approve the code it shows on this site, and a career started in the browser opens on the desktop and back again.
Is there a leaderboard?
Yes. A public leaderboard ranks dynasty net worth, jobs created and the best company sale, with scores for each scenario. Every player has a profile.
Is this really finished, or is it early access?
The game itself is finished. Version 1.0, 141 business types and 103 scenarios. What is not finished is everything around it. That is why there is a waitlist rather than a buy button, and we would rather say that than take your money early.
Do I need to understand accounting to play?
No. You are never asked to fill in a form, only to decide. A good many players report that they understood cash flow and VAT better afterwards, which is a side effect rather than the point.
Is any of this financial or tax advice?
No. Business Baron simulates UK tax, employment and company law for a game. All businesses, people and brands in it are fictional.