The Jobs Market

Deeds and Titles pay you for what you hold. Jobs pay you for what you do. Five cards lie face-up beside the board, in the open, every one of them a public dare, and none of them ever expires. There is no deadline in this business and no paperwork — only a stake, sitting on the table where everyone can count it, quietly costing you a Play a day for as long as your nerve holds out. Most bosses treat the Market like a shop. It isn't. It's a queue, a clock, and a confession, all at once, and the arithmetic underneath it decides more games than the dice ever will.

The One Rule That Governs Everything

A Job prints two numbers. Its Respect is what it pays. Its Stake is the Influence you lock out of your Reserves the morning you claim it, and don't get back until you pull it off. That's the whole contract. But read what a locked marker actually is, because the card doesn't tell you: The Offers run before Fund the Ledger. Stake first, fund second. Every marker sitting on a Job is a marker that never reaches your Ledger — and only Ledger markers buy Plays.

So the stake is not a fee. It is rent, and the rent is paid in Plays, every single Day you hold the card. Claim a 5-Respect Job on Monday and pull it off on Thursday, and you have quietly handed your rivals four short days on the street. Nobody stops you. Nobody has to.

The whole system is one line of arithmetic, and it is worth writing on the inside of your hat:

Plays today = Influence − staked − Heat, up to the Ledger's five slots.

Note what that doesn't say. There is no gate: no Job in this deck is ever unclaimable for want of markers. A big stake costs you actions, not access — you can always reach for the card, you simply buy it with your day. The trade is smooth, one marker for one Play, all the way down to a one-Play morning. Which makes the fifth slot the only thing resembling a cliff, because past it the trade stops costing anything at all.

That table is the guide in miniature, so read it twice. The markers above your fifth are the ones that stake Jobs for nothing, because the Ledger stops at 5 slots and a sixth marker had no other work to do. At 6 Influence you carry a 1-Respect Job for free and a headline Job costs you two Plays a day. At 10 you carry a 5 and a 3 at once and never feel it. The Commission you were buying to win the game turns out to be the engine that runs your Jobs, and nobody tells you that on the card.

Heat Is Billed to the Same Account

Now put the third term back, because that table is a fiction and every real morning has Heat in it. A noisy Play doesn't return its marker to your Reserves — it locks it onto the communal Heat Track, where it sits until a Raid clears the board. It is gone from the same pool the stake comes out of, and it is gone across Days: the Reckoning does not clear Heat. Only the sirens do.

So the ladder in that table isn't fixed — it slides down one rung for every marker cooling on the Track. Your working capital is Influence minus Heat, and only the first five of it buys Plays.

Now count the deck: fourteen of the thirty-two Jobs draw Heat in the act of completing them. All eight Open Fires, the five big Unloads, the lone Extort. The Market sells you cards that burn the very currency you need to claim the next one, and a crew halfway up the Heat Track has no room left to promise anybody anything. That is not an accident. There are only three answers: keep your Jobs quiet, climb the Influence ladder faster than you climb the Heat Track, or let the Raid come — because a Raid returns every Heat marker to its owner's Reserves. The cops kick your door in and refund your stake money on the way out.

One Claim a Day Is a Rate, Not a Limit

Nothing caps how many Jobs you hold. The Offers let you claim one card a morning, and there is no deadline on any of them, so a patient boss simply accumulates: a 1 on Tuesday, a 3 on Thursday, a 5 the following week, all three sitting staked in front of him at once. The only ceiling is what your Reserves can carry, and the arithmetic above runs on your total staked, not on the newest card.

That changes the shape of a plan. A three-card overlap isn't a thing you assemble in an afternoon — it's three separate mornings, and the first card starts paying rent from the first one. But it also means the cheap tier compounds beautifully: two or three 1-Respect Jobs, all riding Plays your liquor business was making anyway, cost a total Stake of 3 and complete whenever the barrels happen to line up. Hold a small standing portfolio and let the board complete it for you.

And the Five-Play Ceiling Is a Fiction: The Kickback

One rule breaks the whole funding equation open, and it's easy to file under "money" and forget. Every barrel of Havana Rum you Unload moves one spent Influence marker from your Reserves back into an empty Ledger slot. Not next morning — immediately, mid-Hustle. Moonshine pays cash only; Rum pays cash and gives you your day back.

So "five Plays" is what Shadows funds, not what the day contains. An Unload costs 2 Influence, so the moment you sell more than two Rum you are running a profit in Plays:

Two limits keep it honest: you can only pull back markers you have already spent this Day, and you can't overfill five slots. Both mean the Kickback is a late-day engine — it does nothing at dawn and everything at dusk, exactly when your Ledger is running dry and the table is deciding who steps off first. Which is where it turns from an economic rule into a political one.

The Market Never Moves — And That's the Whole Design

Nothing on the street ages. No card slides down a row, nothing goes stale, nothing is swept away at dawn. The Market changes only when a player changes it: somebody takes a Job or walks away from one, and a fresh card fills the gap. That single decision — a static Market instead of a conveyor — rewrites how you're supposed to play.

First: there is no clock but your own money. Since the card cannot expire, claiming it early buys you exactly one thing — certainty that a rival won't take it — and you pay for that certainty in Plays, daily, until you fire. Which produces the doctrine this whole guide is built on:

Second: the Market lets you plan in silence, and the tell is your board, not your hand. Because the card will still be there next week, the correct play against a card you want is often to say nothing and move barrels. But understand what you're hiding and what you're not. The Job is public. The stake is public. Your intention is the only secret you own — and it leaks through the board, not the Market. Six barrels drifting toward Fordham, a Safehouse creeping into a rival's Ward, your Boss walking into Queens: a boss who reads turf can see a claim coming a full Day before you make it, and take the card out from under you.

Third: a named Job is a standing bounty. Under a conveyor, the correct answer to Kill a rival Boss in Queens sitting face-up was to wait five days for it to rot off the end of the row. It doesn't rot. The Toll Booth Trap sits there, unclaimed, until somebody is man enough to take it — and until then, every Boss on the board simply avoids Queens. That is the deck doing work with cards nobody has even claimed, and it is why the four headline bounties are named by borough. Read the Market as a map of where not to stand.

The Reverse Snake

The rule is printed on the Turn Structure card and you'll play it right from your first morning: the Brew drafts in Turn Order, first token to last — then The Offers immediately run in reverse, last token to first. What takes longer to sink in is what that reversal does to you. Your Turn Token isn't a rank. It's a package, and the two halves point opposite ways.

Now look at how you get a token, because this is where it turns vicious. Tomorrow's tokens are claimed in the order players Lay Low, lowest first, and you cannot pass — on your turn you make a Play or you step off. So the boss who stays on the street longest is the boss with the most Ledger markers left to burn — and, as we'll see, the one who can manufacture more of them. Which means:

Read that and the shape of the whole system falls out. The Jobs Market taxes itself. Take the big Job today and the machinery quietly walks you to the back of tomorrow's queue; take nothing and it hands you first refusal on everything the city is offering. Nobody wrote a rule that says you may not hoard Jobs. The turn order does it for them, every morning, for free.

There are exactly two ways out of that tax, and they are the two things this guide keeps pointing at: climb to 10 Influence, where a stake stops shortening your Ledger at all, or hold Rum, where you refill the Ledger mid-day and choose your own closing time. A crew with neither is at the mercy of the loop. A crew with both never queues at all.

And it cuts the way a good game should, because commitment and freedom buy different things. A crew carrying three staked Jobs, or half its markers cooling on the Heat Track, has a short day: it steps off the street early, takes the low token, and is paid for it in dice — the best Red in the city and the first Play of tomorrow's Hustle. A crew carrying nothing has a full day, is still working when the others have gone home, and is paid in cards instead. Neither seat is a punishment. They're two different currencies, and you're choosing between them every time you decide whether to make one more Play.

The Staring Contest — and What It's Actually About

Late in the Hustle, with two markers left and nothing urgent to spend them on, you are in a staring contest. Step off now and you take the low token: tomorrow's dice, tomorrow's tempo, and a Market picked over by the time it reaches you. Burn a Play you don't strictly need and you outlast the man beside you for first refusal on the street.

But tempo in the abstract is almost never what the contest is about. On most evenings nobody cares and everyone drifts off in whatever order their markers ran out. The contest sharpens on exactly one kind of night: when a card is face-up that two of you want, and both of you know it. Then the queue is the whole game, and it is won three ways — by reading him, by hiding yourself, and by having the Rum to outlast him.

Layer one: read what they're building toward

A rival's plan is written in two places, and neither of them is his face. His staked hand is public — every Job he holds is face-up, so you already know what he needs. His board tells you when he'll be ready for it: barrels drifting toward one Speakeasy, a Safehouse creeping off his home turf, bodies gathering two blocks from a Dock, his Boss taking a walk into Queens for no reason he'd explain. Put the two together and you can date his claim to within a Day.

Then do the same for the cards he hasn't claimed. This is the harder read and the more valuable one, because it's the read that lets you deny him something he hasn't paid for yet. A crew that has spent four Days massing Rum in Red Hook is telling you which card it wants off the street, whether or not that card is in its hand.

Layer two: don't be readable yourself

Everything above is being done to you. The Claim-Late Doctrine says build first and claim on the morning you fire — but that only works if the build is quiet, because the window in which you're vulnerable is precisely the window in which you're visibly ready and don't own the card yet. Get that wrong and you hand a rival a free denial: he takes the card, you've done all the work, and the Respect belongs to nobody.

• Assemble late and assemble fast. Six barrels arriving in Fordham across four Days is an announcement. Six barrels arriving in one Move, on the morning you claim, is a fait accompli.
• Don't let the last Play be the obvious one. If your position only makes sense as a run at one specific card, you have already told them. Stage from somewhere that threatens two things.
• Weigh claiming early anyway. Sometimes the tell is unavoidable — you cannot hide a Safehouse walking across the map. When the build is inherently loud, pay the rent and lock the card, because the alternative is doing the work for someone else.
• Or be the Vipers. Whispers claims the deck's top card face-down. Rivals see a Stake and nothing else, which is the only way in the game to hold a Job that cannot be read, cannot be denied, and cannot be pre-empted.

Layer three: Rum wins the staring contest

And here is the lever, the one that turns the whole thing from a guessing game into a plan. Everyone else's day ends when their Ledger runs dry. A crew holding Rum decides when its day ends. Sell three barrels and you are a Play up, with no Heat; sell four and you're two up. So when a card you both want is sitting on the street, you do not have to hope he blinks — you Unload, refill your Ledger, and simply outlast him, then take first pick at dawn.

That is what makes Rum the quiet backbone of a Jobs game. It pays the same cash as Moonshine, so a crew that never Trades sees no difference on the ledger sheet and cannot understand why it keeps getting to the Market last. And it compounds three ways at once: the Rum ladder Jobs (The Angel's Share, Cuban Prince, High Roller, The Smuggler's Run) pay Respect for the very sales that buy your tempo, the Knights get a free barrel on every Trade, and a Rum sale at a High Society joint pays $500 a barrel on top. Trade up, or spend the game explaining why the good cards keep going to somebody else.

When to blink first anyway

• Step off early when tomorrow's Mash is a number you own, when the pool looks likely to leave a Blowback on your own boiler, or when there is simply nothing on the street you could complete this week. Dice beat cards when the cards don't fit you, and the man who wins a queue he had no use for has paid for nothing.
• Hang on to the end when a card you can fire tomorrow is face-up, when a rival is visibly one Play from a Job you both want, or when you're the Harbormaster and named tomorrow's Mash yourself — you already know what the dice will do, so spend the token on the Market instead.
• Remember Odd Jobs. Stepping off with markers still in the Ledger pays $100 apiece. It's the consolation prize for losing the contest, and on a Day you're saving toward a Bribe it's reason enough to blink first — the Bribe buys you the queue back permanently.

What the Deck Actually Asks You For

Thirty-two cards, twelve at 1 Respect, twelve at 3, eight at 5. They sort into four families by what they demand of your board, and the families play nothing alike.

Logistics: the tier that pays you for playing well

Fifteen of thirty-two cards ask you to move, trade or sell liquor at scale — and if your Brew engine is working, you were going to do that anyway. The Angel's Share (3+ Rum at a $300 joint), Last Call (4+ barrels), The Dutchman's Deal (Trade 3+ at a Dock): these are 1-Respect cards that ride a Play already on your list, for a Stake of 1, which is free at the Influence everyone starts with. There is no cheaper Respect in the game and there never will be.

This is also where the escalation bites, so plan for it. Completed Jobs leave the deck permanently, the 1s are the preferentially-claimed tier, and there are only twelve of them. The cheap Respect drains out of the game one way. Take the free ones early, while free ones exist. A boss who sniffs at 1-Respect cards on Day 3 is a boss shopping in a Market of nothing but campaigns on Day 12.

Muscle: you don't have to win, you only have to kill

Read the rule that governs every combat Job, because it is more generous than it looks: a Job is a deed, not a board position — the deed counts even if it didn't survive the Play. Kill the man, then lose the block, and the Job still pays. The Pier Six Brawl, The Irish Goodbye, The Butcher's Ledger and The Toll Booth Trap ask for kills, not for ground. A suicide raid that murders two dockhands and gets thrown back into the river is a completed Job. Only the cards that say Seize, take over or destroy need the outcome to stick.

What makes them hard is the arithmetic on the other side. A firefight counts as one Play however many rounds it runs — but every round costs its own Influence out of your Ledger. So the real ceiling on a combat Job is the Ledger's five slots: Move in with one marker and you have at most four volleys left in you, ever, on any Day, at any wealth. Stake 3 for a headline kill-count Job at 6 Influence and you walk in with three markers — one to enter, two to shoot — against a garrison the Combat guide says needs three-to-one and four volleys to break.

Estate: the cards that move your whole game

Six cards ask you to put your Safehouse somewhere specific, and since Recruit only happens at your Safehouse, that is never a cosmetic request. Union Dues and Last One Standing both push the house into a Borough whose Deed you don't hold; The Beachhead puts it next door to a rival's; High Roller and Fortress Staten pick the district outright. Claim one of these and you are agreeing to rebuild your spawn point in somebody else's neighbourhood, which is a campaign, not a Play.

Their compensation is that they're the only Respect in the deck that nobody can interrupt. No rival stands between you and your own Safehouse. If the board has turned hostile and the muscle cards are out of reach, the Estate family is where a losing position can still bank points.

The odd three, and the trap in each

• The Empty Casket (Rise a new Boss in a Ward you Control) reads like a consolation prize for a disaster. It isn't — it's an insurance policy, and the difference is the timing. You cannot claim it after your Boss dies: no Boss means you skip The Offers entirely, and by the time you've spent a Play to Rise, the deed is behind you and the card is unclaimable forever. So it only ever pays if you were already holding it when the worst happened. At Stake 1 it costs nothing to carry at 6 Influence and nothing to carry at 10. Take it on a quiet morning, stake it, and forget it — the Blowback, a Sicilian Hit, or a bad firefight will eventually make you very glad you did. The one thing to watch is that it wants a Ward you Control, so keep one in the family.
• The Insurance Job (Rat, and have the Raid padlock a low-Pressure Still you Control) hands you the Rat Card, which blocks Bribing and the crown until it leaves you — and it only leaves when your Boss dies or a rival Rats. That makes it a strictly early-game card: 3 Respect while your Influence ladder hasn't started, and a self-inflicted wound afterwards. Note the engineering it wants: the Raid hunts the hottest mob, then its most-barrelled district, so you must be the loudest crew in town and pile barrels on your worst boiler to make the cops kick the right door.
• The Five Families (Extort from a District in all five Boroughs, one Play) is the deck's only Extort, and its price is Staten Island — the borough nobody visits, whose Deed is boxed and whose boilers are hopeless. Five Respect for holding a footprint nobody else bothers to build. It also always draws Heat.

Reading the Board: The Four Lanes

1. Your borough's free three

This is the single most useful thing on the board, and it is invisible unless somebody points at it. Every mainland Borough has exactly one Speakeasy that is neither garrisoned at setup nor padlocked by the Police, and all four sit at Pressure 5. Each one has a 3-Respect card written on it, and it is the easiest 3 you will ever earn in your own back yard:

Every seat reads one friendly 3 and one hostile 5, and the four bounties are deliberately borough-disjoint — which is exactly why no single Play in the deck can ever fire two 5-Respect Jobs. Take your own orphan early. Watch for your own bounty appearing on the street, and when it does, move the thing it's hunting.

2. The Staten Island lane — nine Respect nobody is competing for

Staten Island is nobody's home turf, its Deed is boxed, and its boilers are the worst in the city (Westerleigh at Pressure 1, Tottenville at 3). So nobody goes there. And yet three cards worth 9 Respect between them are written on it, and every Dock in the city connects to Staten's two as though they were adjacent:

• Fortress Staten (1) — Secure your Safehouse into any Staten district.
• Rum Row (3) — Trade 4+ Moonshine at a Staten Dock in one Play.
• The Smuggler's Run (5) — Move 6+ Rum from a Staten Dock to a mainland Dock in one Play.

They chain. Haul moonshine in, Trade 6+ at Westerleigh or Tottenville — that's Rum Row done on the spot — then run the Rum straight back out to any mainland Dock for The Smuggler's Run. Two Plays, 8 Respect, on turf no rival is watching. The price is honest and it is the reason the lane is empty: you must ship the moonshine there first, because Staten can't brew it. Build this lane behind a Harbormaster crown and it's the quietest empire in the game.

3. The High Society lane is locked until somebody starts a fire

Two of the eight headline Jobs — Opening Night (Unload 8+ at a High Society joint) and High Roller (Secure into a High Society district holding 4+ Rum) — target rooms that begin the game padlocked by the Police and impassable. They cannot be attempted at all until a Raid throws one open. Add The Insurance Job, which needs a Raid by definition, and three cards in this deck are waiting on the sirens.

Which turns Heat into a strategic resource rather than a punishment. If your Respect plan runs through the swanky rooms, you want the track to boil — and the same Raid that opens the doors also returns every Heat marker to its owner's Reserves, refilling the stake pool of everyone at the table. The High Society lane is also where the money is ($500 a barrel against $300), and it sits on all four Still-7 boilers, so it is contested by the Brew and the Night Mayor race at the same time. It is the richest and the latest lane on the board.

4. The East River and Jamaica Bay

Two labelled bodies of water do quiet work in this deck. The East River touches four Speakeasies — East Harlem, Astoria, Williamsburg, Red Hook — and carries both a friendly card (The Grand Tour, Unload 4+) and a hostile one (The Irish Goodbye, kill 3+ and take no Control). Jamaica Bay holds two Docks, Sheepshead Bay and Jamaica, and carries Night Landing. If you sit on either water, more of the deck is written for you than for anyone else — and the Bronx, landlocked from both, interacts with the fewest cards in the game. A Bronx boss should lean harder on the borough-generic Jobs and his own orphan joint at Fordham than on the water.

Denial: Taking a Card You Never Intend to Do

You may claim any Job on the street. Nothing says you have to complete it. Take the card a rival has spent four Days building toward and it is simply gone — not discarded, not recycled, just locked in your hand for as long as you care to pay for it. This is real and it wins games. It is also priced, and you should know the bill before you reach.

So below ten Influence, hate-drafting is a genuine sacrifice and it should be reserved for the moment it decides the game: a rival on 12 or 13 Respect reaching for the card that crowns him. Then it is cheap at any price, because there is no tomorrow to save Plays for.

Overlaps: Real, Legal, and Mostly Not Worth Chasing

Nothing stops one Play from completing two Jobs, or three. Unload four barrels of Rum at Sunny's Bar in Red Hook and, if you hold all four cards, you collect Cuban Prince, Last Call, The Angel's Share and The Grand Tour at once: 6 Respect for a single sale. Kick down the right door in Whitestone and three cards pay together for 9. These stacks are deliberate. The design's own test is breadth — a set that can only fire in one or two districts has been earned; one that fires in a dozen merely found you — and every stack that survives in the deck is the earned kind.

Why it's a valid play

Because the Market is static, an overlap is something you can wait for. The second card doesn't rot while you're setting up the first. And the ceiling is genuinely high: nine Respect from one firefight is more than every Title on the board combined. Nobody who pulls that off got lucky — they drafted three cards on three separate mornings, carried six markers of stake through the whole build, and engineered a Play in one of two districts on the map.

Why it's marginal anyway

Four reasons, and they compound:

• You can't choose your cards, only take them. The Market is Player Count + 1 wide. A three-card stack needs three specific cards out of thirty-two to surface on three different mornings, while nobody else takes them. You cannot commit to that plan on Day 2, because on Day 2 you can't see it.
• One Job per Day, and every Day is rent. Three cards is three Offers minimum, and the earliest is staked the whole time. That Whitestone triple carries a Stake of 6: at 6 Influence it leaves you zero Plays and cannot be attempted at all. It is only playable at 9 or 10 Influence, which is to say only by someone already near the crown.
• Your hand is public and so is your target. Three staked cards face-up on the table, all pointing at Queens Docks, is not a plan — it's an announcement. The rival simply walks his Boss out of Whitestone, and there is nothing you can do about it. The bigger the stack, the more Days of warning you give.
• The big stacks are the hard verbs. Every 8- and 9-Respect stack in the deck is an Open Fire — the one family where the Play itself eats Ledger markers by the volley, on a Day your stake already shortened.

So the correct posture is not to build for overlaps. It's this: know which cards nest, and pick up the second one when the Market puts it in front of you. Holding The Angel's Share and seeing Last Call flip face-up is a one-marker, one-morning decision that doubles the pay on a sale you were making regardless. That is the version of this strategy that wins games. The nine-Respect firefight is the version you tell stories about.

Three Principles of the Offers

The Four Mobs at the Offers

Everything above is mob-blind. Each family bends it in exactly one place.

So What's the Optimal Play?

There isn't one build, and the first read is always the same: how much Influence do you have, and what is already on the street?

The through-line: the Market is not a shop, it's a queue you pay to stand in. The skill isn't spotting the fattest card — everyone can see all of them, that's the point. It's knowing exactly which morning to reach, and having climbed the Influence ladder far enough that reaching costs you nothing.

Read the deck itself in The Jobs Deck — all 32 cards, sorted by Respect — or see the other two halves of the empire in the Brew Engine guide and The Standoff. The full sequence of the morning, Offers included, is in the Rulebook under Phase 1: Shadows.

Unlike the Brew and Combat guides, the figures here are not Monte Carlo estimates — the Jobs layer is deterministic, so every number above is read straight off the rules: Ledger fill at Shadows is Influence minus staked markers minus Heat, capped at 5 slots, before any mid-day Kickbacks; stake costs are Stake × Days held; the co-firing table is generated by tools/breadth_audit.py and tools/overlap_audit.py against the live card table, and the deck's hard rule (never two 5-Respect Jobs on one Play) is machine-verified. Combat odds referenced in passing come from the Combat Simulator. What the tools cannot model is the table: which cards actually surface in a Player Count + 1 Market, who reads whose barrels, and whether the man holding the card you need can be talked out of it. Those decide more games than the arithmetic does.