Frame it as an experiment
0 to 2 min- Say: “We built something we are still testing, and you are the test. This is a game about whether a working family can make it in America. Play it straight: make the choices you would actually make.”
- Everyone plays alone, on their own phone. No grouping up. Open a room at /host, put /host/YOURCODE/screen on the projector, and let the room point their cameras at the QR code. If the projector is not the laptop that opened the room, add ?host= and the key to the address.
- The wall tells them to set their household while they wait, so the first stage is not a surprise. Names appear as people take a seat. When the room is in, press Start the game once. That is the only button you press until the end.
Let the room live its twenty years
2 to 14 min- Every phone runs the whole life at its own pace: four stages, ages 32 to 52. Nobody waits for anybody. Fast players finish early and watch the wall.
- The wall is the four categories with everybody's name in them, and the height of each band is how many people are standing in it. Point at it once: “Watch the bands.” Say nothing else.
- Down the left, the deck deals itself one door at a time, so the room can see what it is waiting for. When a door opens for somebody, diamonds fall down the wall and their name is printed. Read one out loud when it lands.
- If someone says the dial never lands on a door, say: “Keep playing. That is the game working, not the game breaking.”
Slide one: the room, and the conversation
14 to 18 min- When most of the room has closed the ledger, press End the game. The wall keeps the same bands and the same names; the QR gives up its space and the line about similar choices appears under the title.
- Read that line. Do not paraphrase it.
- Ask the people standing in the green band: “What did you do differently?” Let them answer. Do not correct them.
- Then ask the room: “Who made roughly the same choices and is standing in a different band?” Hands will go up. Name the gap out loud: the choices were nearly the same, the deal was not.
Slide two: the chances of making it
18 to 22 min- Press the right arrow (a clicker works) or the button on the wall. One chart, six bars: doing everything right with no door, saving hard and buying a home on your own, the same life if we made it affordable, and then one door, two, three.
- Say the top bar out loud. Twenty years of cutting every cost, chasing every raise and investing every spare dollar, and no family in this chart arrives. That is the whole argument, and it is not a lesson about effort.
- Then the ink bar. These families bank five years and buy on their own, and owning does build real equity. On its own it still stops short of the line. Buying was never off the table; it is just not enough without an opening.
- Then the amber bar. Making it affordable, with no door, does not carry a family across either: when the bills shrink, life grows into the room. Doors stack from there, and they go further for a family that is not drowning. The room should leave wanting both, not choosing between them.
- If someone asks why the house is not enough: owning an appreciating asset is what moves a family, and the families who make it were handed the rest of the way. This chart asks who gets handed it.
- Close on the panel to the right: what matters is doors, and here we are, opening doors for people.
- Left arrow goes back to the room if a question needs the names again. Nothing is lost.
Pair and debrief
22 to 25 min- Pair someone from the green band with someone from the red. One question each: “What happened in your life that did not happen in mine?”
- Close with the turn: none of this is a law of nature. Every door in the game exists in real life at pilot scale right now. The rigging is a design choice, and design choices can be changed.
What the Wall Shows
Four categories, below the asset poverty line at the bottom and essential wealth at the top, every household named in its own band, and each band as tall as the number of people standing in it. Every band prints the real dollar bar for the room's age. There are only two slides after the lobby, driven by the arrow keys: this room, and the chances of making it. Neither one scrolls. The chart below is the same shape at player scale. While the room is playing, the ladder holds the right half of the wall and the left carries the QR code for latecomers and the doors that could still open. After that, three beats, driven by the arrow keys: the ladder, the chances of making it, and the turn.
Essential wealth
26
$336K GATE
Emergent wealth
17
$224K GATE
Above asset poverty
43
$6K GATE
Below asset poverty
14
One box is one percent of households
NATIONAL FIGURES: ASPEN FSP, ESSENTIAL WEALTH, JUNE 2026, FIGURES 5 AND 6. THE GATES ARE THE COLORADO ESSENTIAL WEALTH TABLE V3.1.5, POOLED SIPP 2022 TO 2025, IN 2024 DOLLARS, FOR A FAMILY WITH CHILDREN AGED 40 TO 49. EVERY BAR IS TUNABLE.
Questions that open the room up
- Did the dial open a door for anyone? What was it, and what did it change?
- Who tried to buy a home and heard no? What was the reason the lender gave?
- Who made it while doing nothing unusual? Who did everything right and still did not?
- What would have had to be true at your kitchen table at 32 for your ending to change?
- Which lever would you pull for this room first, and who would it move?
If things wobble
- Someone joins late: they can still take a seat and start. The wall measures every family against the bar for its own age, so mixed pace is honest.
- A phone dies: nothing to rescue. The wall keeps every other family moving, and the ledger on that phone resumes if it comes back.
- The wall needs the facilitator key: open the screen from the same device that opened the room.
- Rehearse alone first: open a room with a seed, play one life through on your own phone, and watch yourself appear on the wall.