New Danish strategy game turns greenwashing, tax havens and lobbying into weapons

Greenwashing, tax havens and lobbying are not just jokes in the card text. They are things you can actually do in the game. Every example below is taken straight from the cards: the decent option on the left, the ruthless one on the right.

For players who enjoy strategy games where what the other players are doing actually matters - especially if you like card drafting, building your own engine and occasionally interfering with someone else's. The corporate satire is part of the appeal too: lawsuits, shitstorms, consumer research and questionable business decisions are not just jokes, but part of how the game works.

One-liner

Ruthless Returns is a free satirical strategy game about modern business: build an empire, or tear down the one next door.

Short description

Ruthless Returns is a free satirical strategy game about modern business. You play one of 14 entrepreneurs and build your company over three fiscal years through simultaneous drafting. You can bet on great products, investments and happy employees, or go after your rivals with lawsuits, media storms, poaching, lobbying and tax havens. The player with the most cash after the third fiscal year wins.

Full description

Ruthless Returns is a satirical business strategy game built around simultaneous card drafting: everyone makes their decisions at the same time, so you are never waiting through five separate turns. Over three fiscal years, one to six players build companies, and the richest entrepreneur at the final reckoning wins.

There is no single strategy you have to follow. You can build a strong company with good products, smart investments and decent working conditions. But you can also spend your energy on your rivals: sue them, plant evidence, poach their key employees, start media storms, pull political strings or move the money offshore.

The satire is grounded in things you already know from real business life: patent lawsuits, the war for talent, lobbying, greenwashing, media management and aggressive tax planning. In the game they become concrete strategic choices. One card, for example, lets you choose between paying for proper parental leave, which strengthens your company in the long run, or taking the far more cynical route and pocketing the cash now. Which one is the right call depends on the situation.

The game is free on Steam and in the browser, where it also runs on phones and tablets. Steam and browser players share the same online lobbies, and the game supports solo play against AI, shared screen, and team modes (2v2, 2v2v2, 3v3). Ruthless Returns began as a physical board game, and a physical edition is in development.

About South Harbour Studios

South Harbour Studios is a small Copenhagen-based studio from Sluseholmen, created as the home of Ruthless Returns and future projects. The studio is run by Thomas Lay, who created the game together with his wife, Diana C. L. Ruthless Returns is its first release.

Ruthless Returns began as a physical board game that Thomas Lay and his wife, Diana C. L., started designing in 2022. During the pandemic they played a lot of 7 Wonders with their family. They loved the drafting format, but after many games Thomas started missing more variety, more direct interaction and more ways to approach the game.

At the same time, Thomas had long felt there was a game missing about some of the absurdities you see in business: big companies with polished values and strong brands that end up in tax haven scandals seemingly without real consequences, sue each other through bought-up patents and proxy companies, and spend millions on lobbying to get special rules approved in their favour. And after watching The Boys, a series that also makes fun of how cynical the chase for profit can get, the idea stuck. Those two ideas became the foundation of Ruthless Returns.

The prototype worked, but it quickly turned out that getting a physical board game produced and into stores was a whole project of its own. Production, print files, components, freight, pricing and distribution pulled focus from the part that was actually fun: making the game. So the cards ended up in a box in the basement.

They stayed there for about four years.

In 2026, Thomas came across a LinkedIn post from someone who had built a small game with the help of AI. It made him dig out the old prototype again. The rulebook and the cards became the starting point for the digital version, and for the next months nearly all his spare time went into turning the board game into a real video game and getting it ready for release on Steam.

Ruthless Returns was released on Steam on 15 August 2026 and is still being actively developed. New improvements and adjustments land alongside the first players arriving and giving feedback.

The goal has never been to tell players what is right or wrong. The fun part is that the moral choices are also strategic choices. You can build a company with good working conditions, strong products and long-term investments. Or you can be a menace. The game has to be fun both ways.

Thomas is not a game developer by day; he works as a job consultant in Copenhagen. Ruthless Returns is his first video game and the first release from South Harbour Studios, named after Sluseholmen in Copenhagen's South Harbour, where Thomas and Diana live.

The original board game cards are still in the basement. If the digital edition finds its audience, the plan is to get them back on the table.

The game's dirty tricks have real-world counterparts, and we have collected them on a reference page with sources: more than 30 entries pairing the game's cards with documented cases like the Silicon Valley companies' secret agreement not to headhunt each other's people, the sugar industry's paid Harvard research, Danish cartel and corruption cases, Dieselgate and the PR firm that anonymously pitched stories about its client's competitor to the press.

See the reference page: Based on a True Story →

We originally made Ruthless Returns as a physical board game in 2022, entirely without AI. The prototype worked, but taking the step from a finished game to actual production and publishing seemed like too much to take on back then.

The first cards used licensed images with a painted filter. It worked, but the look was largely decided by whatever images we could find.

When Claude Fable 5 came out in June 2026, I needed something concrete to try the model on. I dug out our old cards and rules and asked it to build a video game from them.

Pretty quickly I had an ugly prototype.

But it worked.

Since then I have spent hundreds of hours building on it: UX and UI, multiplayer, cards and mechanics, balance, illustrations, animations, voices and all the small details it took to make it feel like a real game.

AI has been used throughout that process. The code was developed together with Claude, the artwork was created with Midjourney and ChatGPT, and the character voices were made with ElevenLabs.

Balancing combines manual playtesting with more than 500,000 simulated games. The simulations make it possible to examine win rates, card strength, strategies and interactions across far more matches than I could realistically play by hand.

If players take to Ruthless Returns, I hope to one day come full circle and release it as the physical board game it started as.

The game's official AI disclosure is also on its Steam page.