blackMarket

About the Game

blackMARKET is a run-based criminal empire incremental. The centre of your operation behaves like a black hole — product, cash, and influence appear at the periphery and get pulled inward. Your job is to widen the mouth.

THE CORE LOOP

Each session is an operation: a distribution window, a street-sales period, a laundering cycle. You manage throughput and suppress heat before the clock runs out. When the window closes, you reinvest. The next run starts with a larger, more capable network.

Everything curves inward. Late-game looks like a cartel logistics network collapsing into a single invisible owner.

THE EMPIRE MAP

The upgrade tree is a criminal-enterprise diagram, branching by operational family:

• Counterfeit — forged packaging, shelf mimicry, retail camouflage

• Narcotics — clandestine synthesis, potency, survivability under pressure

• Territory — crews, safehouses, local footholds, district control

• Distribution — runners, wholesale cells, ports, route density

• Laundering — fronts, shell accounts, wash cycles, clean turnover

• Corruption — civic favours, judicial delay, inspector management

• Heat — burn protocols, ghost routes, evasion discipline

It's fog-of-war. You see what you've bought, what's immediately unlockable, and one edge beyond. You don't know what you're building until you're already building it.

HEAT

Heat accumulates during operations — faster at full capacity, slower when cautious — and carries between sessions at a decaying rate.

Low heat: the network runs. Medium heat: options compress. High heat: the operation shifts to damage control — launder capital, burn routes, go quiet. Let it run long enough and you lose territory.

Every automation upgrade permanently raises your base exposure. There is no way to scale and stay invisible. The tradeoff does not resolve.

THE NETWORK

The upgrade tree covers narcotics formulation, territory control, laundering operations, institutional corruption, and enforcement evasion. The copy for each reads like an operations memo. The UI tracks throughput, heat levels, and network efficiency. This is the language the empire uses internally. It has no other language.

STATUS: NETWORK EXPANSION ACTIVE

CONFIDENCE: MANAGED