Belonaire

A game about how
households actually survive.

The board is a calendar: thirty days around four corners, a ring of months, a ring of years. Every household has three tokens, so its position reads as an age.

Play now (opens in a new tab) How it plays Get it

Play in your browser, or download it for your phone or desktop.

Whoever goes the furthest wins. That is the whole score.

The shape of it

There is no last year.

Costs rise every five years and never stop, so the game ends when the last household can no longer move. Nobody wins by arriving somewhere. They win by lasting longer than everyone else.

Time is the board

Days, months and years are rings you move through. Where you are is how old you are, and everybody can see it.

The bill that arrives because things went well

What your own shape charges you: the tax on what you hold, the upkeep on what you bought, a child every year they are a minor. It grows because you succeeded, and it arrives long after the decision that caused it.

Nothing tells you the winning line

Every idea in the game is explained as a rule and its consequence. Nothing says what to buy or in what order, because a game that tells you how to win stops being a game.

Why it exists

It teaches the arithmetic by making you live it.

Everything the other products compute, this one makes you feel across a few decades in an afternoon. You meet the rising cost base, the reserve that turns out to be too small, and the want that quietly charges you every time you land on it.

Then somebody at the table asks a question the board cannot answer, and that is the moment the rest of the ecosystem is about.

Two ways to play

In a browser, or on a table.

The app

Playable signed out and offline. Saved games follow you between devices, every game replays exactly from its own seed, and your household’s story is written as you play.

The box

The calendar board, both decks, the deeds, the tokens and the rulebook. The version you play with people in the room, which is the one it was designed for.

What Belonaire never does

  • No progress bar, level or badge. The three tokens are the only indicator of progress, because they are the score.
  • The register is not a leaderboard. Names and years of declarations, unranked and untotalled. It is a summit book.
  • The story never coaches. It records that you set the reserve in year two. It will not tell you that was clever, or what to do next time.

What costs money

The house is free.
The table is not.

Play against the house for nothing, at every difficulty, for as long as you like. Every character, every space, every card in the deck, and the full telling of each move.

What a subscription adds is people. Inviting up to eight of them to a table you dealt, a seat that is always there when somebody invites you, the room beside the game, playing as a household where carrying somebody costs the carrier, and every shared game you finished, kept.

Nothing is taken away to sell it back. The single-household game is the whole game, at full quality, and it stays that way.

Get it

Play it, or own it.

Three ways to play

$3.99 a month

Play with friends on screen

Invite people into your game and play together from wherever each of you is.

Learn more

$65, pre-order

The physical board game

Everything you need is in the box: the board, the money, the cards. Play it the way you would play any board game, with nobody’s screen involved.

Pre-order the board game

The rest of the ecosystem

Everything reads one position.

The board’s companion Belonaire Go Put the bank away. Belonaire Go runs the money while you play the board. The reading Books Where the eternal conversation begins. Survive. Grow wiser. Decide what it was all for. For your household Belon Everything you can compute about your money. For your business Belon Enterprise Everything you can compute about your business's money. Written here Blog My notes from the eternal conversation. Money, and everything money sits inside. Spoken Podcast Long conversations about the choices that shape a life.

Then the question the board cannot answer.

Which is where Belon starts, and where the game politely stops.

See Belon How it all works