How to Play

Getting Started: Set Up a Shift

Click Play solo, or press 1 anywhere on the site. Solo needs no account. The setup screen asks for a few choices, top to bottom:

• Game mode. Sales or Technical. Under it, the map tiles show where you play: the island city for Sales, or one of the five plants for Technical.
• Discipline. Instrumentation, Electrical, Mechanical or IT. It sets the products, the questions and the rivals.
• Question source. Shown when you are signed in. Pick the official questions or one of your own question sets.
• Character, company and name. Pick one of four characters, then type your company name and your own name.
• Brand color. Colors your devices, your office and your route on the board.
• Shift rules. 6 to 18 turns (12 by default), 1 to 5 real minutes per turn (3 by default), and Easy, Medium or Hard.

Solo runs autosave as you go: leave mid-shift and the Continue saved game button brings you back to the same turn. A save is deleted 7 days after its last update. Multiplayer, the ranking and your own questions need a free account.

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Two Modes, Four Disciplines, One Board Game

Field Device Empire is an industrial training game built on one dice-driven board. Sales teams, maintenance crews and training departments use it to practice products, competitors and troubleshooting. There are 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' technical questions in your discipline before the process bites back.

Each mode then comes in four disciplines (subcategories), so every team trains on its own trade:

• Instrumentation. Field devices: flow, level, pressure, temperature, analyzers and their protocols.
• Electrical. Power distribution, motors, drives, protection and switchgear.
• Mechanical. Pumps, bearings, gearboxes, seals, compressors and vibration.
• IT. Industrial networks, servers, OT security and plant software.

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

What Each Discipline Trains

In Sales mode, the discipline sets what you quote:

• Instrumentation. You quote field instruments: pick the measurement principle, technology, line size, protocol and any add-ons the customer asked for.
• Electrical. You quote electrical solutions: motors, drives, soft starters, switchgear and protection, sized to the load and matched to the customer's supply system.
• Mechanical. You quote mechanical equipment: pumps, valves, bearings, gearboxes, seals and compressors, sized to the duty and fitted with the right options.
• Industrial IT / OT. You quote industrial IT/OT solutions: switches, servers, firewalls and plant software, matched to the site's network and security needs.

In Technical mode, it sets the problems the operators bring you:

• Instrumentation. Operators call about flow, level, pressure, temperature and analyzer problems. Pick the one answer a good instrument technician would give.
• Electrical. Operators call about trips, overheating motors, drives, protection and safe isolation. Pick the answer a good electrician would give.
• Mechanical. Operators call about vibration, leaking seals, bearing wear, cavitation and alignment. Pick the answer a good mechanic would give.
• Industrial IT / OT. Operators call about network outages, servers, backups, access and OT security. Pick the answer a good OT engineer would give.

Rival companies change with the discipline too: in Sales mode you lose deals to competing instrument makers, electrical suppliers, pump and valve houses or IT integrators. Custom content packs built for your company show up as extra choices in the discipline picker.

Five Plants, Five Processes

Technical mode isn't a one-plant game. Pick from five, each with its own map and operators, from onshore treatment plants to an offshore FPSO. In Instrumentation every plant has its own dedicated question bank; the other disciplines bring questions matched to each area's equipment:

• Wastewater Treatment Plant. Pump station to disinfection and outfall, 7 process areas, 28 dedicated questions.
• Copper Concentrator & Hydromet Plant. Crushing and screening through thickening and tailings, 8 process areas, 100 dedicated questions on slurry density, flotation chemistry, leaching and electrowinning.
• Potable Water Treatment Plant. Intake to conditioning and disinfection, 8 process areas, 100 dedicated questions built around turbidity, membranes and disinfectant residual.
• Chemical Core Processes Plant. Batch and continuous reactors through blending and dosing, 8 process areas, 100 dedicated questions on reaction, separation and distillation instrumentation.
• FPSO — Floating Production Unit. An offshore production ship, from the turret, risers and manifolds through separation, gas compression and treatment, produced water, seawater injection, utilities and power generation to cargo offloading, 9 process areas, 78 dedicated questions on separators, anti-surge control, TEG dew point, oil in water and fiscal metering.

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

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Question Source: Official or Your Own

When you are signed in, setup shows a Question source step, in solo and when you create a room. It lists the official questions first, then each of your sets, and the sets of companies you belong to, with how many questions and quotes match the mode, discipline and map you picked.

• Official questions. The game's reviewed content. It is the default and the only source that can count for the ranking.
• Your own sets. A game uses only that set, never mixed with official content. A set is selectable once it has at least 4 troubleshooting questions (T1) for the chosen plant, or in Sales 4 phone problems (S3) or 4 quotes, and your email is verified.
• What changes in play. Categories your set does not cover simply do not appear, and a small set repeats questions. In Sales, a set with at least 4 quotes across 3 or more industries scores revenue and margin; with fewer quotes, or none, the target becomes service points with no margin rule.
• Not ranked. Games with your own sets never enter the ranking. The HUD shows the set name, and each question carries a Custom question tag.

Playing a Turn

Every turn follows the same rhythm in both modes. The turn clock runs in real minutes: when it reaches zero the turn ends, and you can press End turn earlier.

1. 01Check the request list. Each request shows where it is and how many turns it has left.
2. 02Pick one. It becomes your destination and the route lights up on the board.
3. 03Roll two dice with the Roll button or R. Your character walks the route space by space at a pace you can follow, and the camera tracks the move.
4. 04Long trips take more than one roll, sometimes more than one turn.
5. 05Stop on an event tile along the way and a good or bad event fires.
6. 06Arrive and the request opens, or press Talk (T) on that square. Answer it: your character celebrates a win or complains about a loss.
7. 07Meanwhile phone messages arrive on their own. Answer them before they expire.

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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 question in your discipline: a real troubleshooting call, from a drifting flow transmitter to a tripping drive, a vibrating pump or a dropped plant network. 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.

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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 product family: a measurement principle such as Coriolis or radar, a drive or motor, a pump or valve, a switch or server, depending on your discipline.
• The right variant and size or rating. On medium and hard, some requests make you calculate it from the process data.
• The right interface: a protocol, a supply system or a network standard.
• 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.

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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 stocked product family 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 production 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.

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Events, Trust & the Boss

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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Camera & Controls

The board is a 3D scene you can move around freely. When a piece starts to move, the follow camera eases in and tracks it, Mario Party style, holds on the arrival for a moment, then hands the view back to you.

• Your input always wins. Drag, pinch or scroll and the follow stops until the next move. A plain tap does not cancel it.
• Remembered per browser. The follow camera is on by default, and your choice is saved in this browser.
• Reduced motion. If your system asks for reduced motion, the camera snaps instead of swooping and characters skip their biggest celebration moves.
• Multiplayer. When you are not moving, the camera follows the latest rival move.

Multiplayer: Race the Clock Together

Rooms take 2 to 5 players and a match runs for 8 real minutes. Every player needs a free account. The host creates the room, picks the map, the discipline and the question source, then shares the room code. If the host picks one of their own sets, every player gets those questions, the answers stay on the server, and the match is unranked.

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.

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Ranking: What Counts

The Ranking page shows multiplayer points by period (daily, weekly, yearly), by mode (Sales or Technical) and by category: All, or one discipline.

• What counts. Finished multiplayer matches played with the official questions of a discipline.
• Fair-play rules. A match counts when it ran at least 4 minutes and 3 world ticks, at least 2 players made 5 or more moves each, and the players were not all on the same network. Up to 12 ranked matches per board and 24 in total in any 24 hours; extra matches still play, unranked.
• Never ranked. Solo runs (they are practice), games with custom content packs, and games with your own question sets.
• Your public profile. Company and LinkedIn show next to your name only if you opted in.

Create Your Own Questions (Beta)

Turn your own know-how into playable questions: your products, your competitors, your plant scenarios or your onboarding content. You need a free account with a verified email.

1. 01Open My questions. From your profile, or go straight to /questions.
2. 02Download a template. One file per language: the English template (comma separated, English columns such as question, option1, correct) or the Portuguese one (semicolon separated, columns such as pergunta, opcao1, correta). Both open in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets.
3. 03Fill in one question per row. Category, discipline, industry or plant (area optional), difficulty, the question, 3 or 4 options, the number of the correct one and an optional explanation. Want both languages? Fill both templates and upload each file.
4. 04Upload to a set. Create a named set or pick an existing one, and upload the file saved as CSV UTF-8. It is all or nothing: if any row has an error, including a limit or a question already in the set, nothing is imported. The page lists each error with its spreadsheet row, column and value; fix the file and upload it again.
5. 05Play it. Pick the set in the Question source step, solo or when you host a room.

Covered categories: troubleshooting questions (T1), operator complaints (T2) and boss talks (T3) in Technical; phone problems and objections (S3), commercial complaints (S4) and boss talks (S5) in Sales. Quotes are not written in this CSV: build them in the Quote editor (next section).

• Per bucket. Up to 10 questions per category, per industry or plant area, per discipline, in each set.
• Per set and account. Up to 150 questions per set, 10 sets and 1,000 questions per account.
• Per file. Up to 200 KB and 200 question rows, 10 uploads per hour and 30 per day.
• Fill with AI. The page builds a ready-to-copy prompt for your AI assistant in the exact template format, and a fix prompt if an upload fails. Nothing is sent to an AI by the site, and you review every row.
• Step-by-step guide. A printable walkthrough with example rows and the most common errors is at /questions/guide.
• Plain text only. No HTML, links or spreadsheet formulas.

Quote Scenarios (Beta)

Train Sales on your own portfolio. The Quote editor builds a product catalog and customer quote requests that play like the official quotes: configure, price, negotiate. You need a verified email to create or edit.

1. 01Open the Quote editor. From My questions, or go straight to /questions/quotes. Pick or create a set at the top.
2. 02Build your catalog (1 · Products). Start from a template (instruments, motors and drives, pumps and valves, OT networks), a blank catalog or one you already made. Edit 4 to 10 products with options, sizes, connections and extras. If your real prices are much larger than the game's, set a currency label and a price scale from 0.1 to 100: players then see every amount in your currency.
3. 03Write the quote requests (2 · Quotes). Choose the industry and difficulty, write what the customer asks, then click the right configuration in the same quote form players use. The checklist shows whether a player can read every decision from the text, and the budget table shows which margins close the deal. Add an explanation, and optionally a discovery question the player must ask first.
4. 04Test it. The live preview shows the customer's email; Try it lets you quote as a player, with the game's own rules.
5. 05Import, AI and export (3 · Import and AI). Import JSON or two CSV files (catalog.csv and scenarios.csv); nothing is saved if any row has an error. The AI helpers build catalog, quotes, translation and fix prompts to paste into your assistant. Export JSON or CSV as a backup.
6. 06Play it. Press Play this set, or pick the set under Question source in a Sales game with the catalog's discipline, solo or when hosting a room.

• Playable. At least 4 quotes (or 4 phone problems, S3).
• Revenue and margin. With at least 4 quotes covering 3 or more industries the game scores revenue and margin; the target grows with the industries you cover, up to the official target when all 8 are covered. Below that, quotes still appear and the game scores service points.
• Mixed sets. At an industry with both quotes and phone problems, about 6 in 10 board requests are quotes.
• Safe and unranked. Solutions stay on the server, rooms keep a copy of the set from when they were created, and games with your own quotes are never ranked.

• Say every decision in the text. Sizes, process data, protocol and required extras should be readable from the request. Aim for an all-green checklist.
• Discovery for the missing detail. Use a discovery question for the one thing the request leaves out, in about 1 quote in 3.
• Spread and mix. Cover 3 or more industries and mix Easy, Medium and Hard.
• Duplicate and vary. Save and duplicate, then change a size or a protocol: the fastest way to fill a set.
• No confidential data. Do not paste real customer names or non-public prices into the editor or into a public AI tool.

Free beta limits: 3 catalogs, 4 to 10 products per catalog, 10 quotes per industry in a set, 40 per set and 200 per account. Quotes count toward the 150 items per set and 1,000 per account.

Company Packs (Beta)

Trainers and team leads can share question and quote sets with a whole team. In the beta the owner is the only content manager; members play.

1. 01Create a company. On /company, with a verified email. Each account can create 1 company in the beta.
2. 02Invite your team. Members tab: create an invite link valid for 1 to 7 days and 1 to 14 people, and share it privately. It is shown only once.
3. 03Add content. Content tab: upload CSV questions into company sets, or open the company Quote editor. Members see set names and counts, never the answers.
4. 04Play. Members pick the set under Question source, Company sets, solo or when hosting a room. Rooms with a company set are members only: other players must be members of the company to join.

Free beta limits: 15 members including the owner, 10 sets, 50 items per set (80 when the set has quotes), 350 questions and 100 quotes per company, 10 uploads per hour. Company games are never ranked. If the owner deletes their account, the company and all its content are deleted: transfer ownership first to keep it.

Account & Privacy

• Sign up. A username, an email and a password of at least 10 characters.
• Activate your account. We email you a link that is valid for 24 hours. Opening it confirms your address and signs you in. Until then sign-in asks you to confirm your email first and offers Send a new link. After an email change, confirm the new address from your profile to keep uploading and playing your own questions.
• Forgot your password. Use Forgot password? on the sign-in page. The reset link works once and expires after 45 minutes.
• Profile security. Change your email (it is verified again) or your password, and sign out of all other devices.
• Your data. Download my data gives you a copy of everything stored about your account. Delete my account and data asks for your password and removes it together with your match points, saves, uploaded questions, catalogs and quotes, and the companies you own.
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