Match the order. Ship the toy. Do not ask what the factory is really for.
Russian Toy Builder is a shift on a toy assembly line, played against a clock and a foreman. An order slides onto the docket — a head, a body, sometimes an accessory — and the parts ride past you on the belt. Drag the right three into the slots and press SHIP before the timer runs out. Three mistakes and you are fired. Between orders the people around you lean in: the Foreman to threaten you, and three others to tell you things you were not supposed to hear. Meet the daily quota, decide whether to take the overtime, and work out what is actually being built in this building.
STORY & LORE
The Shift
Seven toys a day is the quota. The belt does not stop, the orders do not get simpler, and the foreman counts your mistakes out loud. Three strikes is the end of your employment and, the letter implies, rather more than that. Survive the day and you are offered overtime: three more toys, on a faster belt, for the kind of reward that is never quite specified.
The Four Voices
The portrait beside the line changes every few shipments. The Foreman is the one you answer to. The Wife wants you home earlier and does not trust him. The Co-worker knows which exits have been welded shut and where he hid a key. The Mystery Woman does not bother with hints at all. Each of them has a public line and a private one, and the private ones are the actual story.
What Is Being Built
The doors are welded at night. The lights flicker too long. There is a kerosene ledger in the office and drums were delivered after dark. You are making teddy bears. Everyone keeps telling you that you are making teddy bears.
CHARACTERS & ENEMIES
The ForemanLine SupervisorVILLAINAppears when you fail. Smiles too wide, counts your strikes, and mentions your fingers more often than a colleague should.
The WifeAt HomeALLYWants you to come home earlier. Has noticed the deliveries. Says, plainly, not to trust him.
The Co-workerSecond ShiftALLYKnows exit 3 was welded. Hid a key near locker 12. Keeps working anyway.
The Mystery WomanUnlistedENEMYDoes not give hints so much as instructions. Suggests you stop waiting for your cousin.
HOW IT PLAYS
Filling an order
The docket shows a head, a body and — on STANDARD orders only — an accessory. Drag matching parts off the belt into the Head, Body and Accessory slots, then press SHIP ORDER. Ship a wrong combination, or let the timer run out, and you take a strike. If the order is unfillable, BURN ORDER clears it at a cost, which is cheaper than a strike.
Speed and scoring
Score is paid on the time left when you ship: a near-instant order is worth roughly double a last-second one, so the whole game is a bet on how fast you dare work. Every successful shipment also speeds the belt up permanently, and every new day adds a further 18%. EMERGENCY freezes time once per day — spend it on the order that would have ended the run, not the one that is merely awkward.
Tickets and the board
A finished shift pays 2 TIX, and beating your own best pays 10 more. The final score goes to the RUBLES EARNED leaderboard — the number on the results card is exactly the number that reaches the board.
GALLERY
THE WORKING DAY
| Thing | Value |
|---|---|
| Quota | 7 toys per day |
| Overtime quota | 10 toys |
| Strikes allowed | 2 (the third fires you) |
| Emergency freezes | 1 per day |
| Belt speed per shipment | +15% |
| Belt speed per day | +18% |
| Ship bonus | up to ~2x for a fast ship |
VERSION HISTORY
- Brought into the arcade from a standalone HTML build: manifest, registry entry, thumbnail and this wiki.
- Wired to the Arcade SDK — final score goes to the RUBLES EARNED board, and a shift pays TIX (2 per run, 10 more for a personal best).
- The four character portraits were imported as idle/talking VIDEO loops whose twelve files, ~30MB, were never shipped — so every portrait was a broken video over a still. Rebuilt on the stills with a CSS talking animation, and re-encoded them to WebP: 4.8MB of PNG became 203KB.
- The three music tracks were missing the same way and threw a media error on every single play. Music is now optional and off; all SFX are synthesised and unaffected.
- Made it fit the frame it is given. The two-column layout had a 960px breakpoint and the portal's game frame is ~900px wide, so inside the site the game had never once used it — it always fell back to the stacked phone layout and ran 1378px tall inside a 560px box. Fixed the breakpoint, made the belt and portrait heights proportional, compacted the phone layout, and fixed two grid min-size traps that were clipping the story text and the portrait.
- Marked portrait-orientation: it fits a phone held upright exactly, and a phone held sideways has too little height for the line and the slots at once.