Startup Panic is a fun management game about a social media company, but will it be as bold as I’d like?

I often find myself intrigued by games where you have to manage a business – not the slow, thoughtful ones like Strange Horticulture (which I like for a different reason), but the surprisingly deep management ones that are like strategy games except for coffee production instead of war.

I am usually catastrophically bad at these games, as I lack the sheer nerve to commit all my assets to something at once, or take out loans to cover a product run, even in a fictional digital setting. Still, I was drawn to Startup Panic like a moth to a flame, and giggled to myself at the prospect of cosplaying as a Silicon Valley nerd trying to reinvent having a chicken coop. I called my founder Beth, and the company was therefore Betherium. But it turned out that the product I was tasked with making and selling was, basically, Facebook.

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