Black Budget: Operation

FILE: BLACK BUDGET — OPERATION BRIEF — EYES ONLY

You run the agency that does not exist, on the budget line nobody audits. Senators, contractors, cartels, directorates—every Threat runs on a schedule, and the schedule is on the table: a visible queue of the beats it intends to execute, in order. Your cards don't just deal damage. They edit the calendar.

Delay the artillery into next week. Pull the bribe forward and pocket it twice. Swap the audit ahead of the shredding. Cancel the verdict outright—or tax it until it can't pay for itself. Hover any card and a ghost preview shows the timeline you are about to sign. Commit when the future looks right.

- Scripted intent timelines. All 45 enemies run hand-authored scripts: wind-ups you must move, guards that punish impatience, counters that bleed attack spam, and liability beats that pay you. Bosses rewrite their own queues at phase change.
- Ghost-preview rewriting. Six timeline verbs—delay, advance, swap, cancel, copy, tax—are previewed on the conveyor before you commit. The plan you see is the plan that resolves.
- A 90-card playable pool. Six archetypes across three fictional commanders: Orion Vale's contractor economy, Colonel Hess's signal tempo, and Mara Zhao's influence cell. Every upgrade shows its numbers.
- Gem socketing with honest text. Twelve gems patch cards at the rules level. Tooltips state exactly what changes, downsides included.
- The Heat 1–10 ladder. Ten tiers of stronger scripts, curse pressure, and marked-up shops. Run hot for the payoffs; launder it down before the bill lands.
- One shared local daily operation. Same seed for every operator, every day. The current build files the run locally and keeps replay validation deterministic; online leaderboard submission is future server work, not a promise.
- Your runs never get patched out from under you. Rulesets are versioned. Saves, replays, and dailies stay bound to the ruleset they started on.
- Declassified paper, analog noir. Manila folders, halftone surveillance photos, redaction bars, rubber stamps, and an original analog-noir score.

Deckbuilding with removal that exists, defeats that file a report, and a map where the elite lane pays for its risk. Read the script. Rewrite it. Close the file.

Black Budget is a work of parody and political satire. Commanders, Threats, organizations, and events are fictionalized composites, are not claims of fact, and imply no affiliation with or endorsement by any real person, organization, or government.