Cargo Desk: a Game About Running a Physical Copper Desk

A lot of commodity analysis is about getting the numbers right. But the part of the job that actually decides whether you make money is a different skill: committing to a position with incomplete information, and then living with the consequences.

I’ve been thinking about how to make that trade-off tangible — and how to let people feel it without needing a desk and a credit line. So I built a game about it.

Cargo Desk

The working premise is a physical metals trading desk. You hold long-term purchase contracts that produce cargoes, and long-term sales contracts that need deliveries. Between them sit a warehouse, limited working capital, the spot market, and the LME and CME forward curves.

The core loop is simple on purpose:

1. New information arrives — cargoes become available, customers nominate demand, the curves move, freight and news change.
2. You allocate — drag supply cargoes onto customer contracts, blend off-spec metal, store, buy or sell spot, hedge the basis, or run a CME/LME arbitrage route.
3. You lock the book.
4. The round resolves and a P&L waterfall shows exactly what made or lost money — and why.

Every allocation is a bet. The obvious cargo might cover a demanding customer now, but using high-grade material today can leave a future order uncovered. A cheap cargo might arrive late. A big visible CME-LME spread can turn out to be unprofitable after freight, conversion and financing.

The game deliberately tries to make the spot market feel like a temptation rather than a fix-it button: as urgency rises, liquidity falls, spreads widen, and the available parcels have inconvenient quantities, timing, or quality.

Current state: a working prototype

This is very much a work in progress. What’s built today is the tightest version of the concept:

• One commodity: copper.
• Six supply cargoes, six customer demands, three locations, three delivery months.
• Live LME and CME forward curves with a visible basis spread.
• Spot buy and sell, warehouse storage and blending, forward sales for contango, and one CME/LME arbitrage route.
• Ten rounds, roughly 75 seconds each.
• A drag-and-drop board with the P&L waterfall at the end of each round.

You can play the prototype here:

→ Cargo Desk (playable prototype)

It runs entirely in the browser — no account, no install. A fresh book loads each round; refresh to restart. The instructions are on the intro screen, and every allocation shows you the expected margin, the delivery confidence, and the risk before you commit.

What isn’t built yet

The design brief for the full game goes much further than the prototype: multiple metals, a campaign that grows from a single copper route into a global desk, daily puzzles, crisis scenarios, endless mode, and eventually competitive multiplayer where players bid on the same spot parcels and freight. The single-player economic loop needed to work first, so that’s what the prototype focuses on.

The game is as much for me as for anyone: a way to make the logistics and risk trade-offs of physical trading concrete enough to reason about. If you play it and a round goes badly, the waterfall will show you exactly where the money went — that part is the whole point.

Feedback welcome. There’s plenty of room to make the desk harder.