Oil Director: Tycoon Sim

One leased block in Texas. A rented rig. A bank that wants its money back.

Oil Director is a real-time strategy game about building an oil company from a single wildcat well into a supermajor. The oil price never stops moving, your wells start declining the day they come on, and every barrel you pump has to get somewhere before your tanks fill up.

FIND THE OIL

Bid for licences, shoot seismic and watch the reserve estimate narrow from a wide guess to something you'd bet on. Then drill. The exploration well is the big gamble: months of rig time, millions of dollars, and at the end of it either a discovery or a dry hole.

PUMP IT

Turn a discovery into a field. Drill development wells, fight the decline curve with stimulation, artificial lift and enhanced recovery, and keep the maintenance budget high enough that wells stay up. Stand still and production shrinks, so exploration never stops mattering.

MOVE IT

Wells fill tanks, trucks and pipelines empty them, and an export terminal ships to the world. When storage fills, wells choke and barrels are lost. Every expansion is a question of where the bottleneck is now.

SELL IT

Sell at spot, or sign contracts with refiners, traders and utilities. Deliver on time and your grades climb and the premium goes up. Miss and you pay for it. Lock in a fixed price before a crash, or regret it before a boom.

RIDE THE PRICE

The benchmark moves through gluts, soft markets, tight markets and full crises, with a three-month outlook that's honest about how wrong it might be. A boom makes everyone look clever. A bust finds out who borrowed too much.

GO GLOBAL

Seventeen oil regions, from Texas, Alberta and Oman to the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, Guyana, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Iraq and the Alaska Arctic. Each has its own geology, crude grade, royalty, tax and politics. Keep relations with each government healthy, or watch the terms change under you.

UNLOCK THE HARD PLACES

Sixteen technologies, from seismic imaging and horizontal drilling to offshore operations, deepwater, subsea processing and arctic operations. The biggest fields sit behind the hardest ones.

RUN THE COMPANY

Hire geoscientists, drilling engineers, operators, safety crews, logistics and corporate affairs staff, and keep morale up. Take loans, pay royalties and profit tax, and read the Monthly Report at every month end: production, realised price, revenue, costs and what's coming.

HANDLE THE TROUBLE

Kicking wells, oil on the ground, compressor failures, strikes, rival hiring raids, new petroleum laws, tax inspectors, blocked roads, and the occasional distressed neighbour selling cheap. Every event is a decision with a real cost.

CLIMB THE TIERS

Wildcatter, Independent, Regional Producer, International, Supermajor. Twenty-nine milestones along the way.

WHAT YOU GET

- Real-time play with pause, 1x, 2x and 4x speeds

- Choose your home region as your difficulty: Texas, Alberta or Oman

- A live operations scene of rigs, pumpjacks and tanks, and a world map that lights up as you expand

- A Monthly Report every month end, and charts of cash and the oil price over time

- Reserve estimates that tighten as you survey, and dry holes that still teach you something

- Several companies at once, each its own save

No offline progress, no timers, no ads, no in-app purchases, no account. The company only runs while you're there.