Blueprint: EV

Blueprint: EV is a single-player strategy game about founding an electric vehicle company and running it through its first six fiscal years. You begin at the drafting table where every decision you make will be felt in quarters you haven't reached yet.

It is built for the kind of player who reads the patch notes, opens the spreadsheet, and wants the simulation to actually mean something.

Five binding decisions, then twenty-four quarters

The game opens with the founding: an eight-act sequence in which you make five decisions that cannot be undone — battery chemistry, vehicle platform, manufacturing model, software stack, and funding source — and choose the management style you'll lead with.

Each combination produces a different starting cash position, a different cost structure, and a different set of covenants with your bank. There are no "obviously correct" answers; there are trade-offs that play out over the next six years.

Then the quarters begin.

What a quarter looks like

Every quarter you work through a four-step decision sheet:

• Pricing & Marketing — set MSRP for each model, allocate consumer advertising and dealer support

• Production & Capacity — plan units per shift, authorise overtime, decide whether to expand the factory

• R&D — one action: facelift an existing attribute, or develop a new model in a new segment (two-quarter pipeline)

• Market Intelligence — buy from a slate of nine market reports; some are worth their cost, some aren't

Then you submit. The market clears using a multinomial logit demand model, and you read the quarterly ledger: revenue, COGS, marketing, R&D, admin, depreciation, interest, tax, net profit, equity, cash. Briefs arrive. Internal events fire. Your phone buzzes once. The next quarter begins.

The arc of a run

A full game is twenty-four quarters across three phases:

• Phase 1 (Q1–Q8): Market Entry. You are alone with three slow-moving incumbents. Establish a position, keep your covenants healthy, do not waste cash.

• Phase 2 (Q9–Q16): Competitive Pivot. Imports arrive, margins compress, the R&D pipeline you started in Q3 begins to pay off — or doesn't. Somewhere in here, the Ordeal: one hard choice that defines the rest of your run.

• Phase 3 (Q17–Q24): Maturity. The market peaks and contracts. Survivors consolidate. If you've built well, an acquisition offer arrives at Q24.

Eight endings are possible. Tech Titan. Market Leader. IPO Candidate. Niche Champion. Legacy Survivor. Covenant Stress. Acqui-Hire. Forced Liquidation. Most players will not see all of them in their first ten runs.

Replayability

• 243 founding combinations across four management styles — close to a thousand distinct opening positions

• Three rivals are drawn from four NPC archetypes; your management style determines who you face

• A single run takes 90 to 120 minutes

What it feels like

Blueprint: EV is the kind of game you play with a coffee, not a controller grip. The board is a navy blueprint where you sketch your decisions on. The cards on top of it are paper. There is no soundtrack telling you how to feel — just a lamp humming in the background that you stop noticing until the numbers start to slip.

What it is not

• Not a tycoon game. There is no idle income.

• Not a roguelike. Runs are deterministic from your founding decisions; outcomes come from your decisions, not from a seed.

Steam features

• 40+ achievements across progression, performance, strategy, and management style

• Steam Cloud — continue any run on any machine

• Lifetime stats: games played, best score, peak market share, units sold

• Leaderboards: high score, best profit, units sold, peak share

• Steam Deck supported, optimised for handheld

• Languages: English