Quorum is a browser game by elianiva. The page title calls it a systems design game for software engineers. The meta description says you grow a startup from one server in a garage to a public company, wire components, pick stacks, and fix one bottleneck after another. Checked 4 November 2026. The HTML shell loaded. The board was not played.
The public source is elianiva/quorum. This is not the Quilibrium messenger, not GoQuorum, and not the multi-model debate CLIs that also use the name Quorum.
Who publishes it
The GitHub API the same day reported owner elianiva, not a fork, created 17 October 2026, pushed 4 November 2026 at 09:06 UTC, default branch main, language TypeScript, 36 stars, 7 forks, 3 open issues, and 0 subscribers. The public description is "The on-call simulator. Try designing your system to survive." Topics are empty. There are no GitHub releases. The homepage field is still quorum.elianiva.com.
HEAD is 13f0c90611485c135b8c5cb9df6140c8b76a90cd, "Turn the title screen into the on-call booth", authored by elianiva on 4 November 2026 at 08:54 UTC.
package.json on that commit says "license": "GPL-3.0-or-later". The README license section says GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. The LICENSE file is the standard GPLv3 text. GitHub's license API returns SPDX GPL-3.0.
JSON-LD on https://playquorum.dev/ types the page as a VideoGame, names the author elianiva with https://elianiva.com, lists genres Incremental, Simulation, and Educational, sets gamePlatform to "Web browser", and sets isAccessibleForFree to true. The canonical URL is https://playquorum.dev/. A request to https://quorum.elianiva.com/ returned HTTP 301 to https://playquorum.dev/. alchemy.run.ts on this commit sets the prod domain to playquorum.dev and lists quorum.elianiva.com as a redirect. CONTRIBUTING.md says CI deploys every push to main to the prod stage at playquorum.dev after checks pass.
Where the code lives
The root of main is a pnpm workspace. apps/web is the Foldkit client and the website Worker. apps/backend is the Effect RPC handlers and the API Worker. packages/simulation is the simulation package. packages/rpc is the wire contract. CONTRIBUTING.md names the stack Cafe. Cloudflare is the runtime, Alchemy is the infrastructure, Foldkit is the UI, and Effect is the server and the shared contract.
Root package.json is private, packageManager pnpm@12.0.0, and engines.node is >=24.11.0. CONTRIBUTING.md asks for Node.js 24.11 or newer and pnpm 12, then pnpm install and pnpm dev. None of that was run. Dev dependencies on that file include effect 4.0.0, alchemy 2.0.0-beta.84, and vitest 5.0.3. apps/web/package.json depends on pixi.js 8.22.0, foldkit 0.167.0, and @foldkit/ui 0.168.0.
packages/rpc/src/paths.ts sets API_PREFIX to /api and RPC_PATH to /api/rpc. alchemy.run.ts binds the API Worker to the website and forwards that prefix. It also creates a D1 database named Results for challenge results. The same file sets Workers observability headSamplingRate to 1, and its comment says sampling at 1 records every request and that both rates should be lowered before real traffic. This check did not read the live Cloudflare settings.
How a company runs
The README on this commit is the play guide. The first Company is one Users node, one App Server, Payments, and Analytics. Requests move along links you draw. Served requests earn Cash. Analytics samples traffic into Insight, which buys research. The simulation is a flow network. One node limits the most revenue, and the board marks it. The card names the limit, such as CPU, credits, RAM, workers, or connections. The README says more hardware fixes only some of those limits, and each fix moves the bottleneck.
Each App Server runs a stack of runtime and framework. The README says no option strictly beats another. The inspector image alt text lists mod_php, PHP-FPM, Puma, Node.js, Gunicorn, Go, Tomcat, Kestrel, BEAM, and Tokio. Go is described as cheap on idle connections, with garbage collection taking CPU when the heap fills. PHP-FPM is described as slow per request and unable to leak memory between requests. Those sentences are the README. This check did not read the runtime formulas.
The same README gives this era table.
| Era | Leave at | New request kinds | New failure mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garage | 1,000 users | page, read | One box runs out of CPU, then RAM |
| Pre-seed | 5,000 users | write, login | Database contention, connections, CPU-heavy work |
| Seed | 25,000 users | search, upload, bot | Unlike workloads, abuse, large payloads |
| Series A | 150,000 users | media, rt, buy | Zone failures, egress cost, money correctness |
| Series B | 1,000,000 users | job, report, ai | OLTP against OLAP, GPU economics, team scaling |
| Series C | 10,000,000 users | feed, hook, push | Fan-out, hot keys, geography, region failures |
| Pre-IPO | 50,000,000 users plus IPO | none listed | Compliance, disaster recovery, margin |
| Public | Endless | none listed | Quarterly guidance |
An incident tests a weak part of the design. The README names a zone outage, a cache stampede, a retry storm, and a CVE. A company ends in an exit. The README names an acqui-hire, an acquisition, an IPO, or stepping down. Equity times valuation pays Legacy. Legacy buys perks. Saved playbooks carry into the next company. New ventures named there include fintech, streaming media, and an AI startup.
Outside one company, the README describes sandboxes and challenges. A challenge is a fixed puzzle scored on cost, tail latency, and complexity. The README says the server re-runs each replay and places the result on a histogram of every player's best, as a percentile rather than a rank. CONTRIBUTING.md says the browser plays the simulation and the API Worker replays it. This check did not submit a replay.
Gotchas
docs/gdd/17-scope-and-roadmap.md on this same commit still opens "What exists today" with build 02f8200. That commit is 02f82006d2da9b11e1b57bb809f09ef3a6e5d3a6, dated 1 November 2026, message "Even out the build dock's top padding". The compare API says main at 13f0c90 is 126 commits ahead of 02f8200 and 0 behind. Catalog counts in that scope section were not copied here.
The sitemap at https://playquorum.dev/sitemap.xml lists only https://playquorum.dev/. robots.txt allows all agents. The page says the game needs JavaScript. The manifest names a standalone display.
alchemy.run.ts deploys prod with full request sampling while CONTRIBUTING.md says every green push to main deploys to playquorum.dev. The comment in the stack file still says to lower the rates before real traffic.
What this check did not do
No clone, no pnpm install, no test run, and no play of the board, a sandbox, or a challenge. /api/rpc was not called. The design documents under docs/gdd/ were not used as the current catalog, except to record that the scope file still names build 02f8200.
See also
- GonnaCrash is 200Lab's graded browser game.
- Syscraft is a hosted system design lab.
- Breakscale is a local discrete-event canvas.