7 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
People on the block now ask you for work — five kinds of paid job, on a clock.
- Somebody on the block now turns up with paid work: a car outside the house, a marker on the corner it's about, and a few hours to take it or leave it.
- Five kinds of job, each one about a different part of your crew — hold a corner, get a driver somewhere, put a snitch inside a rival's place, take a corner off somebody, or cool a corner down before dawn.
- Every job you deliver makes the next one worth more. Take one and drop it and word gets round — nobody asks for a couple of days.
- Jobs show up in the house, on the map and in the top bar, with the pay and the clock in plain sight, and they count on your run-end tally.
- New artwork for every kind of job, and new sounds for the knock at the door, the money in your hand and the job you let slip.
- HOW TO PLAY now explains the work, including the one job you can't win by waiting.
3 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Three new things to build onto the house, and the eighth racket — a bookie, and the fight nights that make it worth holding.
- Build a bar onto the house and your people get their legs back half again as fast, and one extra face turns up looking for work every morning.
- Hire a lawyer and bail costs a third less, nobody sits more than two days, and one of whoever the cops take walks before the wagon even leaves.
- Put a lookout post on the roof and somebody is watching the whole block for good — every corner on the block runs cool without you tying up a lookout to do it.
- A new racket, the bookie. It ticks over quietly all day until word goes round that there is a fight on: from three in the afternoon until nine at night the whole city bets through it and it takes three times its usual money.
- Then the result comes in. The favourite holds and you clear a cut on top. He goes down and the book pays out of your own pocket — it is the only corner in this city that can take money off you. Stand your muscle on it and the fight gets fixed, though a fixed fight is loud, and loud is heat.
- All three of the new buildings actually go up on the house where you can see them, and every odds board in town lights up when the card opens.
31 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
A fourth boss takes over the docks, and the city gets three nights of its own — a police crackdown, a war between rivals, and somebody in your house who talks.
- Sofia “the Harbourmaster” Kroon now runs THE DOCKS. She never pushes a corner and never comes for your house — she takes 30 % of every smuggling payout in the city and of anything you run on her docks, and sends a collector round in daylight to take it. She introduces herself in person the day the docks appear on your map.
- Three ways to deal with her: pay the fixer for a truce, plant a snitch on any corner she owns so the manifest gets cooked and she only gets half, or go and take her HQ. Give her nothing to collect and she spends the round putting another body on the docks instead.
- Crackdown nights: word goes round at dawn, and from ten that night every corner you work burns twice as hot with far more raids. Cop cars all over the city and the clock turns red. Pull people off anything warm, or take the night off.
- Rival wars: some nights the bosses go for each other instead of you. Two whose turf touches spend the night on their own border, and whatever they drop belongs to nobody — free corners, if you are watching for them.
- Somebody is talking: later in a run a boss buys one of your own. Your snitches go quiet, his cars start turning up exactly where you are thinnest, and a car crawls past the house at night without stopping. The fixer will find the leak, for a price.
- The block now starts with one abandoned corner you can take just by walking onto it, and beating Kroon hands you the biggest shipment in the city.
28 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Corner Kings gives you a block before it gives you a city — a wider, quieter map, a guided first shift, and faces for everyone in it.
- The city has been rebuilt with wide roads and real space between buildings, so you can actually see the street you are working.
- A new run now starts on THE BLOCK alone. The rest of the city is dark and fenced off, and each rival’s district opens the first night his cars come out for you — the docks open once you are holding enough corners to be worth robbing.
- A short guided first shift walks you through your first moves on the actual street: pick a crew chip, put them on your corner, start the clock, take a loose corner. Skippable, never repeated, and switchable in Options.
- The map stops shouting. Corner symbols and defender counts fade out when you pull back and come straight back when you zoom in to work, so an overview looks like a city instead of a wall of icons.
- Everybody has a face: portraits for the three bosses and all six crew roles, plus artwork for every racket, every district, the menu and both endings.
- Daytime finally looks like daytime, and the house has moved off the road onto its own plot with a yard out front.
27 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
A sixth kind of crew — the snitch — plus two new rackets, a casino and a laundromat, and a building on every corner in the city.
- The SNITCH is a new kind of crew you send onto somebody else’s corner on their own. Nobody starts a fight, because nobody knows who they are — but while they’re inside, that corner defends at half strength, so your muscle takes it in half the time.
- A planted snitch gets you word from inside: hours before a boss makes his move, you’re told exactly which of your corners he’s coming for. That corner is marked on the street so you can get somebody on it.
- Snitches never fight, but they do get made. The odds are worse inside a boss’s own headquarters, and worse again if you leave them out there until they’re exhausted — bring them home now and then.
- CASINOS are the biggest night in the city and the fastest way to get the police interested. Leave nobody standing over the floor and the house keeps most of the money.
- LAUNDROMATS never earn you a single dollar. What they do is wash the heat off themselves and all four corners around them, hour after hour, day and night. Park one in the middle of your hottest block.
- Every racket now has a real building on its corner — a club marquee with a rope, a garage with a tyre stack, a casino tower with chasing lights, a laundromat with a drum that spins when somebody’s working it — so you can read the whole city at a glance.
- Your crew now actually gets paid at dawn, and new faces turn up to hire every morning. Both were quietly broken before.