Chug coffee and guzzle sweets to stay awake at work in card game Finished!

Slaving away at a boring office job may not sound like the most thrilling of concepts for a card game, but when you have the creator of Power Grid putting his spin on day-to-day monotony, you can bet our ears prick up.

Friedemann Friese’s latest game is Finished!, a solo card game about solving puzzles while working away at a computer (the artwork goes for an old CRT monitor in fitting with the green theme of Friese’s other titles).

Here’s the gist: each round, representing a day of work, the player must try to sort 48 cards into order, from 00:01 to 00:48. So, suitably, it’s not unlike spending your day pretending to work while you really play Solitaire in the background.

What’s slightly different about Finished! is that cards are divided into three time zones: past, present and future. Only cards in the ‘present’ can be rearranged, but some of the cards have abilities that present the chance to play with time, moving cards from one pile into another.

The challenge is to sort the cards before you fall asleep at your desk. To help out, there is a supply of coffee and sweets (in card form, not for real) to give you that vital caffeine kick and sugar rush needed to get through the day.

There are four different difficulties included, and a match takes around half an hour to 45 minutes to play.

Finished! will be out at Essen this October, joining Friese’s past catalogue of ‘F’ titles including Power Grid (Funkenschlag in the original German), Friday, Fabled Fruit, Fauna and Famiglia.