How to Play

Two Modes, One Board Game

Field Device Empire is one dice-driven board game with two very different ways to play it.

• Sales. You're a rep touring an island city of 8 industries, closing quotations before your budget window shuts.
• Technical. You're a field engineer walking a real plant, answering the operators' instrumentation questions before the process bites back.

Same board mechanics. Same turn clock. Completely different pressure.

The Core Loop: Dice, Board, Events

Every turn follows the same rhythm, no matter which mode you're playing.

• Check your pending requests.
• Pick one to work on.
• Roll two dice and travel toward it, square by square. Sometimes it takes more than one roll to arrive.
• Land on event tiles along the way: a shortcut, a delay, or in Sales mode, a rival ambush.
• Arrive and resolve the request.
• Repeat until turns run out.

Board events come in three flavors: good, bad, and (Sales only) rival-triggered. The plant has no sales rivals, only the process fighting back.

Sales Mode: Sell Across the City

Pick a pending customer request from one of the 8 industries:

• Life Sciences
• Water & Wastewater
• Chemical
• Food & Beverage
• Mining & Metals
• Power & Energy
• Oil & Gas
• Data Centers

Travel there, then build the quote. Every part of it has to match what the customer actually needs:

• The right measurement principle, such as Coriolis, radar, or RTD.
• The right line size.
• The right protocol.
• Any required add-ons.

Miss any one of these and the deal is dead on the spot. There's no second quote.

Price it with a margin slider, then submit the offer:

• Within budget. The deal closes.
• A little over budget. The customer stays at the table for a 3-round negotiation. Cut your price. If you still can't land it after 3 tries, they walk.

The Sales Economy: Stock, Price History & Discounts

Selling isn't just picking the right box on a form. You're running a small supply chain too.

• Stock and production. Every measurement principle starts at 3 units in stock, and production adds 1 unit back per turn, up to a cap of 6. Quote something you don't have and delivery slows down. Urgent requests will flat-out refuse a late delivery.
• Production issue events. There's roughly a 1-in-3 chance per cycle that a technology line goes down for 1 to 2 turns. Caught mid-outage, you're selling from whatever's already on the shelf.
• Price history. Every customer remembers your last 5 quotes: what you charged, whether it landed, and the margin you were running. It's a good way to see if you're training them to expect a discount.
• Negotiation. Quote up to 30% over budget and it's still salvageable. Go further and it's dead, no discount saves it. In a live negotiation the customer stretches their real budget a little further each round. You get three chances, then they buy elsewhere.

Technical Mode: Run the Plant

Pick a pending operator request from one of your plant's process areas, then travel there.

You'll answer their instrumentation question: a real troubleshooting call on flow, level, pressure, temperature, gas, or liquid analytics. Multiple choice, one shot. Get it right and their trust climbs. Get it wrong and it drops hard.

• Board requests. The ones you travel to and solve in person.
• Phone problems and complaints. Independent issues that can arrive anytime. Miss the deadline on one of these and reputation slips, even if you never left the control room.

Four Plants, Four Processes

Technical mode isn't a one-plant game. Pick from four, each with its own map, operators, and 100+ questions of its own:

• Wastewater Treatment Plant. Pump station to disinfection and outfall, 7 process areas, 28 dedicated questions.
• Copper Concentrator and Hydromet Plant (mining). Crushing and screening through thickening and tailings, 8 areas, 100 questions on slurry density, flotation chemistry, leaching, and electrowinning.
• Potable Water Treatment Plant. Intake to conditioning and disinfection, 8 areas, 100 questions built around turbidity, membranes, and disinfectant residual.
• Chemical Core Processes Plant. Batch and continuous reactors through blending and dosing, 8 areas, 100 questions on reaction, separation, and distillation instrumentation.

Each plant is a genuinely different troubleshooting job, not a reskin.

Wastewater plant: pump station to disinfection, 7 areas to keep running

Copper concentrator & hydromet: crushing to electrowinning, 8 areas of real mineral processing

Potable water plant: intake to disinfection, keep the city's drinking water in spec

Chemical core processes: reactors to blending & dosing, 8 areas of process chemistry

Trust, Reputation & the Boss

Every customer (Sales) or operator (Technical) has a trust meter from 0 to 100, starting at 60. Their mood shifts as it moves:

• 70 and up: happy.
• 40 and up: neutral.
• 20 and up: sad.
• Below 20: angry.

Trust also has real consequences as it drops:

• Below 25: they lock you out of that industry or area for a few minutes. A warning shot.
• Below 50: the boss, the sales director or the maintenance manager, calls you in to explain yourself.
• 3 industries or plant areas below 15 at the same time: you're fired on the spot. Game over.

Turns, Targets & Winning

Every run has a turn limit, from 6 to 18 turns (12 by default), and a target you need to hit before they run out.

• Sales. A revenue target scaled to your turn count and difficulty. You also need to average at least 20% margin across your deals. Racing to the number on rock-bottom prices doesn't count as winning.
• Technical. A reputation target built the same way, but with no margin catch. Solved problems and complaints are worth more on higher difficulty and harder tiers, so quality answers close the gap faster.

Difficulty Levels: Easy, Medium, Hard

Difficulty isn't a cosmetic slider. It changes how the whole economy behaves.

• Easy. Customers stretch their budget further and tolerate slow deliveries, with no real delivery cap.
• Hard. Customers hold a firm line on price, give you almost no slack on delivery time, and hand you a bigger revenue or reputation target to hit.

Harder difficulty also means requests and phone problems arrive more often and with tighter deadlines. More pressure, more chances to prove it.

Multiplayer: Race the Clock Together

Up to 5 players share the same city or plant in real time, with the state synced every 2 seconds, so you always see where your rivals stand.

• Sales. Deals get contested. The first player to visit a customer opens the bidding, rival reps get a 40 second window to counter-quote, and the customer takes whichever in-budget offer is cheapest.
• Technical. It's a straight race. First to reach the operator gets the job.

Push the boss's patience too far in multiplayer and you're out of the race, though you can stick around and watch the rest of the match play out.

Getting Started: Setup Flow

Before your first shift, you'll set a few things up:

• Your mode: Sales or Technical.
• If Technical, which of the 4 plants.
• Your character.
• Your company name and brand color.
• Your difficulty.

Solo runs autosave as you go, so you can pick up a shift exactly where you left off.