Show HN: Corporate Mind Games – logic puzzles with a sarcastic corporate theme | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Corporate Mind Games – logic puzzles with a sarcastic corporate theme

corporatemindgames.com

50 pointsdontwordle15 comments

I have always enjoyed building and playing puzzles. I am a regular user of NYT Games and LinkedIn Games. I thought it would be fun to create some corporate-themed puzzles as a silly alternative to LinkedIn Games.

So, I built Corporate Mind Games. The games are intended to be a little bit sassy and sarcastic, but I hope they are enjoyable and challenging.

I was planning to post this on HN last week. However, many years ago, I made a game called Don't Wordle, which unexpectedly appeared on the front page last week. I ended up getting distracted by that, and I also figured it was more appropriate to post this game on HN on a Monday morning given the theme. So here we are.

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One of these games involves assembling the perfect office layout for a RTO. A friend of mine works for a major corporation that recently enacted a 100% RTO mandate.

I used to work there too, and knowing what I know about their operations, I am willing to bet that probably 75% of the workforce in their offices are going to spend 100% of official work time on Zoom calls. They own offices all across the company and operate on the principal that every corporate office gets a piece of every corporate operation, so almost every team has only one or two members in the same physical location.

RTO's are almost always soft layoffs nowadays, so it will be interesting to see if the RTO achieves the desired effect or if they still have to reduce headcount in the future. Right now all they're doing is introducing their water, power, and auxilliary staffing costs without any corresponding increase in productivity.

I know I'm in the minority, but WFO works great for me.

My office is in walking distance of my home. I get great office perks (lunch, coffee, quality meeting rooms, good desk and workspace). And having a second space for work that is not my home is great for my mental health and WLB.

All of my meetings are still video conferences. Doesn't move the needle for me.

I choose to be in office 5 days a week even though only 2 are required, and it's been great for my productivity.

WFO in a shitty office is still a shitty experience, but an actually good office space is a productivity boost IME.

Who still has good offices? Seems like the world is steaming full speed towards miserable shared hotelling desk situations.

> My office is in walking distance of my home.

You are definitely in the minority ;)

IMO the commute is the biggest problem with RTO - why must I spend >1hr of _my_ time going to/from an office when I can do the same work at home?

I got incredibly lucky at my first job. The first office we had was a five minute walk from my apartment. I could literally walk home to grab lunch, or to enjoy a private bathroom break. The second office moved to a 10 minute bike-ride away (5 minutes by car, 20 walking - which wasn't pleasant in the Texas heat), and was on the top floor of an office building, and I got my very own office with a door.

That was nice.

Sitting at a shared desk, one row away from twenty sales people who were on their phone all day, that wasn't.

> almost every team has only one or two members in the same physical location.

I was in a similar situation. I wouldn't mind coming in because in person discussions have their their benefit but I resented being made to come in just to sit on Teams calls all day. It was open plan (of course) and everyone else in the giant space with hard surfaces were also on team calls. Even my line manager was in a different physical location.

this is higher quality than i expected given the very ai design

might be worth trying to tweak to look less like the default ai theme

cute overall tho!

That's good feedback. Are you referring to the home page specifically?

I spent most of my time on the puzzle mechanics and just getting the difficulty right.

The puzzle pages also give pretty strong AI vibes to me. I think it just reminds me what I've gotten from Claude when I let it decide on design.

Some of the specifics that come to mind:

- the use of emojis instead of icons

- the text content largely sounds like it's written by Claude. This is a big one and it's everywhere: the names of the games, the descriptions, the status texts, basically every single piece of text that I've read.

- the fact that text is being used for some things at all feels a bit Claude-y, like the "Today's result: pending" status or "Vibes are perfected. Well done."

- a lot of the color scheme feels AI somehow. It's interesting, because it's not like the colors are wrong or anything, they somehow just feel like "default" LLM colors

- same thing with the typography

Yeah it's definitely a mix of AI and me haha. The names, color schemes, and status texts are good callouts. The emojis I actually introduced to start to have a theme across games, though I didn't put them in the org chart game. A lot of the copy was written by AI, and then I didn't like the output and changed it.

I appreciate the feedback that it felt off. That's what matters in the end. Thanks for the taking the time to share this.

Traumatic, the sprint board. Why.

yes it's perfect, I'm having flashbacks

Love the zoom presentation; the tone of voice is spot-on, if chipmunk-ified!

Haha glad you enjoyed. I individually recorded each one (obviously played at varying speeds)

This gave me anxiety, who wants to do work for fun? cool concept though

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