Bull Run: Stock Market Runner

You are a bull loose on Wall Street. Three lanes, one thumb, and a market that speeds up the longer you stay alive.

Green candles pay. Red ones take a third of your margin bar and knock the multiplier back down the ladder. Swipe to change lanes. That is the whole control scheme and it takes about four seconds to learn.

THE LADDER

Every green candle nudges the multiplier up a rung. There are eleven rungs and the last one is 75x. Almost nobody gets there, because a single hit costs you tiers and the road is a good deal quicker at the top than it was at the bottom.

MARGIN

Three hits and you are liquidated. GOLD HOUR gives you one. OVERNIGHT gives you two and refills none of it, so a bad thirty seconds in that room is usually the end of the run.

FOUR MAPS

WALL is a sodium-lit canyon at four in the morning, 1987.

THE LOBBY is eight metres of polished marble with smoke coming off the floor. Every so often the building loses power and you run in the dark.

GOLD HOUR puts the sun straight down the street. One life, better pay.

OVERNIGHT shakes the floor, kills the lights, and now and then snaps the whole frame sideways. It is the hardest room in the game and it pays like it.

TWENTY-THREE BULLS

The Bagholder carries a duffel in each hand, both pointing at the floor. Diamond Hands has fists cut from stone. Maximum Copium runs on two tanks with the gauges near empty. The HODLer of Last Resort cannot be bought at any price.

Every one of them carries a permanent edge: a higher ceiling on the multiplier, a floor under your losses, a first hit that costs nothing, a head start two rungs up the ladder. There are twelve trails to leave behind you.

BEST OF THREE

Runs come in sets of three, and a set scores the sum of all three. There is no such thing as a throwaway run. Close a set, take the bonus, start the next one.

THE NEWS

Headlines land mid-run and you get nine and a half seconds to call it. PRINTER GOES BRRR. PHONE: GONE. PROBLEM: NOT. There are a hundred and twenty-two of them, and you will not see the same one twice in a day.

THE BOOK

Every run you have ever played, drawn as a curve. What a run is worth, how far you usually get, which map you actually play, and whether your third run beats your first.

WHAT IT COSTS

Nothing. There are no in-app purchases at all. The only advertising is rewarded video you choose to watch, there is not one interstitial anywhere in the game, and turning an offer down never takes back anything you have already earned.

It plays offline. There is no account and no sign-up.

Bull Run is a fictional arcade game. There is no real money in it, no real trading, no live market data and no financial advice of any kind. The portfolio figure is a score. Nothing in the game can be exchanged for anything outside it.