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How points work

You have 23 game points for eight people and up to three chip partners. Each person costs 1 to 5 points. Each chip partner costs 0 to 3.

A cheaper pick
leaves more room.

Spend 5 points on one seat and you have 18 for the other seven seats and your chips. Choose a 2-point card instead and you have three points more to work with.

Spend the extra points on another seat or on chips, or leave them unspent.

The draft blocks a pick that would leave too few points for your empty seats. The card stays visible and says why it does not fit.

Example
ONE SEAT5pts
18 pointsacross the other seven seats
23/23 spent0 saved

This team spends all 23 points, chips included. Swap one pick to save three.

5 points does not mean a better scientist.

Points for people are provisional settings for fictional recruitment difficulty and opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is what your lab gives up when it hires one person instead of another. A 5-point researcher is harder or costlier to recruit in the game than a 1-point researcher. Points do not measure ability, quality, prestige or future impact.

1 pt
2 pts
3 pts
4 pts
5 pts

I set point values by hand for a fictional frontier-AI talent market, based on recruitment difficulty and opportunity cost. The factors I imagine include current compensation and equity, institutional position, competing demand, scarcity and switching friction. Research interests, mission, autonomy and willingness to move also matter. These are provisional game settings, not calculations from pay or recruitment data.

Social Leads cost 1 or 2 points. Not every role pool has every point value. Roles are seats in this game, not anyone’s real job.

Building tools
Built or maintained software, research tools, datasets, benchmarks or developer products that others use.
Open work
Research, code, tools, data or writing shared in public. Open weights are not required.

The rules in brief

Pick eight people and their chips within 23 game points to make a lab card. Unspent points earn a Bootstrapped badge. Optional challenges check your team as you pick. Lab names and commentary are jokes about the team.

SPENT 20+SAVED 3=BUDGET 23

Corrections and removals

Message @falseconjecture on X with the card name and what should change. A public source helps with a factual correction.

Look up a card

127 people

Sources support the work descriptions. They do not set the points.

127 cards shown

Who’s in your lab?