Play The Market
Six mines · Thirty days · How much can you make?
£1,000
Bank £1,000
Shares £0
Best result —
Day 1 of 30
Six mines · Thirty days · How much can you make?
£1,000
Play The Market is a free browser game about buying and selling shares in six mining companies. You start with £1,000 and thirty days; the score is what you are worth when the market closes on day thirty. There is no account to create, nothing to install and nothing to pay. It works on a phone, a tablet or a desktop, and a game takes about ten minutes.
Six gem mines trade on the board: agate, garnet, topaz, opal, jade and spinel. Each has a base price it drifts back towards over time, so a mine trading well below base is usually the buy — but the cheaper mines swing hardest, and any mine trading at a fifth of its base price or less can go bust during an update and take your shares with it.
Each day you trade as much as you like at the prices shown, with no broker's fee. When you are done you call the market update, trading is suspended, and the new prices come in one at a time. Interest of between one and eight per cent is paid on whatever is sitting in your bank. Then the day's news may break — a commodity boom, a market panic, a shaft collapse, a foreign buyout, a dividend, or the Chancellor helping himself to a slice of your bank.
Roughly one day in four, an insider tip goes round instead of news. A bullish tip says a mine will rise; a bearish one says it will fall. Most tips are true, and a true tip moves that mine hard at the next update. Trade on one and the regulator may open an inquiry, confiscating the shares you bought on the rumour or clawing back what you raised selling on it. Shares you already held are never touched.
Thirty days is the whole game, so the last week turns tactical: bank what you have, or take one more punt. Make a million inside the month and you join the Millionaires. Every game is a fresh, random market, and when a game ends you can challenge a friend to beat your score.
The game this is built on was published by ASP Software — the software arm of Argus Specialist Publications, the magazine house behind The Valley and Cells & Serpents — in 1983. It came on cassette for the Oric and for most of the other home computers of the day, including the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC. The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge holds a copy of the Oric release in its collection.
The original was simpler: four mining companies rather than six, one to six players taking turns, prices that lurched by up to ninety per cent a round, and the same target of a million pounds. Its news flashes — a mine collapsing, a share doubling, a tax raid on your bank — are the part everybody who played it remembers.
I played Stockmarket on an Oric Atmos in the 1980s and loved it enough that, when I got an Amstrad CPC464, I typed out my own version from scratch in BASIC. This is that game rebuilt for a browser in 2026: six mines instead of four, prices that drift back towards where they started so buying low is a real skill rather than a guess, insider tips, and the same slow reveal of the prices one at a time, which was always the best part.
Is it free? Yes, and there are no accounts, adverts or payments.
Does it work on a phone? Yes, in any modern browser.
Is there a leaderboard? Yes — the best scores of the last seven days, and of all time. Finish a game and put your name on it.
Is my game saved? Yes, in your own browser. Close the tab mid-game and you can pick it up where you left off.