Persistent prison-life RPG · Lite for Android · 3D for Android and Windows · free

A prison-life RPG: choose the inmate or officer career

Play Bars or Badge, a free prison-life RPG with inmate and officer careers. Compare Lite for Android and the 3D test builds for Android and Windows.

Build a life on either side of the bars.

Most phone games open their hand immediately: an advertisement before the first move, a timer telling you to come back in four hours, a chest you can buy, a leaderboard full of people who bought more chests than you did. Bars or Badge does none of that. It gives you a person, an institution of a thousand residents, and no final turn.

Get the games Lite or 3D?

1,000resident slots in every institution
952 / 48inmate slots and officer slots per institution
4 x 250housing blocks and their capacity
11 x 96 seatschow pulls through the Main Chow Hall, and seats per pull

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: a new arrival in county orange standing in the Intake Vestibule, the room drawn behind him — Lite 0.67: the room you are in, with you standing in it.

Two versions, one institution

Bars or Badge Lite and Bars or Badge 3D.

Both are the same prison and the same two careers at Northstar State Penitentiary: an inmate or an officer, 1,000 residents, and no final turn. Pick the one that suits your device, or play both.

Lite · Android · version 0.69.0

Bars or Badge Lite, the 2D game

The whole game on any phone from Android 8.0: intake and the character builder, 161 illustrated rooms, work, meals, the commissary, an officer's rounds and the house the officer drives in from, and every system described on this page. Play it offline against AI with no account, online in a shared institution, or with phones nearby. Two downloads of the same version: one for standard modern phones and a larger one for anything that will not take it.

Download Lite

3D · Android and Windows · version 0.7.0 · test build

Bars or Badge 3D

The same institution built as places you walk through: the cells, the tiers, the dayrooms and the yards, the officer's tactical screen and the inmate's cell-front one, and an officer's home outside the walls with the drive to work, offline and online.

It plays offline against the simulation and reaches the same live match server for online play. This is a test build, so expect rough edges, and tell us about them. The finished 3D game is planned for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Android, playing together.

Download 3D

Choose a side

Two careers. One institution. Neither of them ends.

You walk in as nobody. The intake vestibule does not care who you were outside, and neither does anyone else on the tier.

Everything you will ever have here you have to earn in small, specific pieces: a job that pays, a locker with food in it, a name that someone recognizes across the dayroom, a person who will stand next to you when it goes bad. Meals are not flavor text - if you have not eaten, you cannot work.

Health is not a bar that refills between missions - if it hits zero you wake up in the Observation Bay and lose two turns of your life to treatment.

The people around you remember what you did the last time you were both in this room, and they tell other people, and eventually the version of you that moves around the institution is not the one you meant to build. Or you pin on the badge and find out that the other side is not the easy one.

You are forty-eight staff for nine hundred and fifty-two people. You run count, you supervise movement, you write the reports that follow you for the rest of your career - and every shift somebody offers you a shortcut. Take it and it pays now, and somewhere in that thousand-person population there is an informant, a plant, or an Inspector General investigator quietly building a file you will never see until it is finished.

Play it straight and it takes an exceptionally long career to reach the service, pension, savings, and clean record that let you file for retirement. Both sides are playable. Both sides are hard. The game never tells you which one you are: it just keeps the ledger and shows you, one thirty-minute decision at a time, who you actually turned out to be.

Inmate

You start at the intake vestibule with nothing, a custody classification between 1 and 10, and three objectives for the day. Progress means a better work assignment out of thirteen, credits in your account, food in your locker, standing that moves from Unknown through Reliable, Broker, Neutral, and Block Leader, and people who will actually answer when you speak to them. At level 8 you can found a gang and run operations no lone player can.

The long game is a court-release case that takes an exceptionally long career - or the deliberately near-impossible escape track, which the game keeps abstract on purpose.

Officer

You are one of forty-eight staff for nine hundred and fifty-two people, and the job is posts, counts, movement, searches, escorts, and reports. Fifteen duty posts open up as you climb, each with a location, three named responsibilities, and its own pay.

Formal rank runs ten steps over fifty levels from Correctional Officer to Headquarters Investigator, and every rank tells you what authority it carries. The ending you are working toward is retirement, and it requires service, pension standing, savings, and a clean record that only a very long, very careful career produces.

The corrupt path

Nothing forces an officer to stay straight. Propositions arrive on shift, the corrupt cell shakedown is available to those who have gone far enough, and a sufficiently exposed level 8 officer can found a network, recruit other officers, and promote them from Contact to Chief while continuing to earn public department ranks.

It pays faster than the honest route. It also runs directly at the informants, plants, and Inspector General investigators seeded into every institution, and the case they build is staged, recorded, and invisible to you until it lands.

Fifteen zones develop their own controllers, challengers, and volatility from what people actually do. Hidden informants, plants, and inspector-general investigators build staged cases out of real observed actions, and nobody is marked as having informed until a report genuinely happens.

What is in the game

Systems, not screenshots of systems.

Everything below is in Bars or Badge Lite 0.69.0, the 2D game. None of it is a roadmap item.

The thirty-minute action window

Everyone in the institution shares one repeating thirty-minute window and files one major action inside it, independently. Nobody waits in a thousand-person turn queue: one player deciding in the first minute and another deciding at the deadline both count, and a live countdown sits at the top of the screen.

Movement, conversation, checking your locker, reading mail, and looking people up stay available the whole time. If you never act, a saved default action resolves for you at the deadline, and the phone can send you one reminder in the last stretch of the window if you have not moved.

Consequence review, then a receipt

Choosing an action does not immediately do it. A review panel first shows exactly what the move is aimed at and what it will cost and pay - respect, trust, integrity, resolve, purpose, experience, credits, health, stamina, discipline - and says plainly that nothing changes until you commit. After it resolves you get a separate full-screen receipt: what happened in plain English, then a changed-stats list covering your condition, property, relationships, location, and what is now required of you next.

Careers with no final turn

An inmate career and an officer career both run indefinitely. You keep your level, formal rank, career meters, health, stamina, discipline, objective history, named relationships, credits, saved defaults, and organization membership across every session, every reconnection, and every transfer to another institution. Each finished action window pays earned commissary credits exactly once. Promotion comes from accumulated career experience, never from how long ago you signed up.

Inmate occupations

Inmates pick from thirteen level-gated work assignments - unit porter, kitchen crew, laundry, sanitation, grounds, chapel orderly, industries assembler, warehouse clerk, maintenance helper, library aide, education tutor, barber, and peer mentor. Every assignment publishes its location, three concrete responsibilities, its pay bonus, and which decision focuses it builds. Reliable work is the slow, safe way to earn money and experience; missing it costs you both.

Officer duty posts and the rank ladder

Officers choose among fifteen duty posts, from housing unit and yard through visitation, receiving, hospital, transport, central control, special housing, programs, and intelligence, up to shift commander, operations chief, executive command, and headquarters.

Formal rank runs a ten-step ladder across fifty career levels: Correctional Officer, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Major, Colonel, Associate Warden, Warden, Headquarters Liaison, Headquarters Investigator. Each rank states its authority and its three standing duties in the game itself, so a promotion changes what you are expected to do, not just a title.

161 rooms across fifteen zones

The institution is 161 connected, individually illustrated rooms grouped into fifteen zones: four housing units, education, industries, health services, administration, visitation, recreation, institution services, segregation, movement, the staff areas, and the perimeter. You only learn a room by walking into it - the area map fills in chamber by chamber and unknown exits disclose nothing but their count. Each trip costs time and stamina, and where you are standing decides which people, events, and actions are even possible.

The room, drawn from overhead

Opening a room shows the actual place: correct fixtures, a green marker for you, colour-coded occupants by your relationship with them, and up to fifty individually clickable people on the floor.

The header names who is here and only what you have actually learned about them - a stranger stays 'Recognized inmate 041' until you earn better. You have to walk your marker over to someone before the interaction panel will open, and the room and area maps stay collapsed until you ask for them.

1,000-resident institutions

Every institution holds exactly 1,000 resident slots: 952 inmates and 48 officers, with the officer posts interleaved across the roster rather than bolted on at the end.

Every slot you are not sitting in is run by the simulation, so the population keeps working, eating, patrolling, arguing, and getting into incidents whether one person is connected or a hundred. When a human joins online, they take over one AI-controlled slot one-for-one - the institution never grows an extra person to make room.

999 residents who are not waiting for you

The whole non-player population advances together each time the institution crosses one of its five daily moments: morning count and breakfast, work and posts, lunch and mid-day movement, afternoon recreation and searches, dinner and evening count.

Each resident keeps their own room, credits, experience, level, health, stamina, discipline, meals, attendance, and last simulated moment, so they get promoted, injured, disciplined, and moved without you. Adding more AI residents never slows your turn down, because they resolve as one batch instead of taking turns.

People who are actually people

Every resident is generated from a catalog of 16 origins, 32 traits, 24 motivations, 36 quirks, and 50 multi-stage life events, producing twelve bounded behaviour weights including cooperation, aggression, honesty, loyalty, empathy, discipline, and patience. A life event bends what someone is likely to do; it never dictates a response or stamps them as violent or dishonest.

Their history is stable for that world, so moving away and coming back does not silently replace who they are. On top of that sits attachment and conflict style, stress behaviour, coping strategies, values, trust builders and breakers, pressure triggers, and blind spots.

Earned knowledge, not a database

You never get an omniscient directory of a thousand people. Knowledge of a person climbs through seven states - unknown, recognized, introduced, familiar, understood, trusted, confidant - and search only ever runs over facts you personally learned.

Private backstory, motives, the source events behind a habit, money, inventory, and exact whereabouts stay hidden until trust is genuinely earned. Officers get one exception: duty-authorized roll call gives them names, classification, work assignment, and last reported location, and nothing about loyalty or personality.

43 person actions

Selecting somebody opens the actions that role pair actually allows - 43 in total across inmate-to-inmate, officer-to-inmate, inmate-to-officer, and officer-to-officer. Inmates can talk, trade, befriend, recruit, protect, threaten, extort, rob, challenge, attack, jump, ask about rumours, and settle debts; officers can question, order, search, confiscate, warn, discipline, escort, separate a fight, call medical, use force, and on the corrupt path run a cell shakedown.

The engine checks physical presence, duty status, room type, treatment and emergency restrictions, organization membership, and whether you actually have a gang ally standing nearby.

If the target is another human being, the game records your approach - it never invents their consent.

Gangs

A level 8 inmate can found a gang, recruit, and promote members through a five-rank internal ladder - Prospect, Member, Enforcer, Block Rep, Shot Caller. Membership unlocks operations that a lone player simply cannot run, most obviously the gang-assisted jump, which requires an ally physically in the room with you. Zone control is real: fifteen zones each track a controller, a challenger, influence, control margin, volatility, and how often control has flipped, and resolved actions move those numbers.

Corrupt officer units

An officer who has taken enough of the wrong opportunities can, at level 8, found a corrupt network, invite eligible officers, and promote them through their own five-rank track - Contact, Trusted, Coordinator, Deputy, Chief - while still climbing the formal department ladder in public. The corrupt path is what unlocks the housing-unit cell shakedown and the propositions that arrive on shift. It also puts you squarely in front of the people whose entire job is watching for exactly that.

Investigations and hidden informants

Every online 1,000-resident institution seeds covert roles you are never shown: 32 inmate informants, 4 officer informants, 4 fictional DEA plants, and 2 Office of Inspector General investigators. They observe misconduct, and their reports build staged cases with real recorded consequences - identities, locations, and source records stay private unless a later adjudicated event reveals them.

Nobody is ever labelled a snitch by rumour: a resident is only ever described as having a reporting history after a report genuinely happened and you have earned confidant-level knowledge of them.

Fights

A fight is decided by who is physically in the room, so the sides can be badly uneven and often are.

The server freezes the exact attacker and defender lists, computes power from career and your strongest equipped gear, holds bounded odds and a deterministic roll, and then applies one durable batch of consequences to every participant exactly once - health, stamina, discipline, heat, and medical treatment where it is needed. You see your own receipt in full; you do not get to read everyone else's vitals.

If your health reaches zero you are moved to the Observation Bay for two treatment actions - the career survives, the week does not.

Searching rooms and improvised projects

Rooms can be searched and their fixtures tampered with, and what you find is real property you keep.

From those components the game exposes a searchable catalog of 122 concrete improvised projects - 110 made from one source material in one form and 12 two-part designs, of which online play uses 100 - each listing the property it consumes, the time and stamina it costs, its attention and detection risk, where it can be built, and what it is worth in a fight.

There is no construction minigame and no instructions: the server resolves the project abstractly and hands you the tradeoff.

Commissary

The store sells 100 individual foods across meal bases, protein, snacks, drinks, and condiments, plus twenty durable items - a hygiene kit, writing supplies, a sketch set, radio headphones, a sweat set, a crochet kit and more.

Every item has a picture, a credit price, a serving size, a meal value, and its own locker limit. Prices and names are grounded in published public canteen and commissary catalogs and then balanced as game values, and the store refuses a purchase at your locker limit instead of letting you overfill it.

Lockers and cells

Your cell is drawn overhead from twenty distinct layouts, with an open-locker view, category thumbnails, live possession markers, and a saved four-way arrangement of your belongings. The locker is where food, found property, components, and finished projects actually live, each capped by its own item limit. Officers get a staff locker of their own. Earned-credit property can be lost to a robbery, extortion, shakedown, or fight; premium coins, paid outfits, mail tokens, and identity assets never move that way.

Chow pulls

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are hard gates: you cannot do the matching routine action until you have eaten. Going to chow is free, sends you to Main Chow Hall in one of eleven scheduled chow pulls of up to 96 seats, and always produces a social incident you do not control.

The alternative is eating from your locker - combine one to eight owned items to reach four meal points - which skips the incident entirely but restores less stamina and costs you the food.

Mail

Standard private mail between players is accepted immediately and becomes readable exactly sixty minutes later - real minutes, not game minutes - and it can cross between institutions to reach a friend on another server - Lite mail stays among Lite players. A letter can carry a request for earned credits. Instant delivery consumes a held token. Mail uses in-world character names and opaque identifiers; there are no email addresses in it and no open chat anywhere in the game.

Daily objectives

Every prison day hands you three deterministic objectives drawn from a sixteen-template role-aware catalog. Progress and rewards are resolved authoritatively and can only ever be paid once. They are the steady spine under the improvisation: something to do on a day when nobody is trying to rob you.

Personal development

Between the dramatic days there is the boring, effective work: conditioning and exercise, fight practice, checking books out of the library and reading them in your cell, correspondence courses, and family relationship calls. These build bounded, gradual advantages that show up later in combat, in legal work, and in how people treat you. Development actions produce their own detailed receipts so you can see what an hour of reading actually bought.

Emergencies

Thirty-seven researched emergency types run as multi-phase operations rather than one-line announcements: warning where applicable, active response, recovery, clearance. Fires, floods, sewer failures, grid loss, camera and door-control failures, weather, chemical plumes, medical isolation, staffing collapse, mass refusals, and threats each close specific rooms, relocate the right occupants, change movement posture, and switch meals to in-place trays. Officers get an operational order; inmates get the version of the day that is actually happening to them.

Institution-wide events stage everybody, localized ones only touch the affected area, and nothing - a robbery, a search, a fight, a yard bout - gets to walk through a closed room.

Transfers between institutions

You can move to another active institution and take your life with you: career state, level, score, saved default actions, commissary credits, premium coins, mail tokens, inventory, equipped outfit, condition, and relationship memory all travel. A verified account owns one Bars or Badge character name across every institution, transfer, reconnect, and device, kept separate from the safe account alias other games see.

Lifetime endings

There are three deliberately exceptional ways a career can actually finish. An inmate can build a court-release case - researching the case, preparing filings, and seeking judicial review, which needs maxed legal knowledge and case preparation, 90 conduct, 70 outside support, three filings, and a long cooldown between hearings.

An inmate can instead pursue a deliberately abstract escape, which needs maxed readiness and opportunity, 80 secrecy, an even longer cooldown, and carries extreme risk - the game models the attempt, never a real method.

An officer can file for retirement once service, pension standing, savings, and a clean record all clear their thresholds. The screen says it plainly: these endings take a very long career.

The character creator

First run asks who walks into this world. You type an in-world name of your own, choose your sex and one of eight stock bodies - Balanced, Lean, Athletic, Power, Compact, Heavy, Tall, Veteran - set your height, weight, muscle and face shape, place bonus points across strength, agility, awareness and presence, and choose your hair style, hair colour and skin tone. It needs no face scan, no photo, and no external avatar account.

Your sex, build and skin tone follow you into every illustrated room scene, in county orange at intake, the issued green after it, or an officer's navy. Your name and appearance are fixed once you walk in.

Weather and season

The institution sits in a Denver climate that follows the real calendar and real current conditions and alerts, plus neutral official policy context, all of it frozen into one snapshot per action window so every player previews and resolves against the same weather.

Season and conditions move residents between indoor and outdoor areas rather than inventing or deleting people, and they shift the modifiers on the day. If the official sources cannot be reached, the game says it is showing a season-only fallback rather than passing off stale data as current.

Cameras, patrols, fatigue, and visits

Cameras can catch you live or be reviewed after the fact, so an action that nobody saw is not automatically an action nobody knows about. Officers walk patrol routes and exercise judgment on what they find. Fatigue accumulates and sleep matters. Family visits happen, and so do the quiet propositions that come with them.

Three ways to play

Decide before anything else happens.

Offline against AI

Play the complete career with no account, no sign-in, and no network at all. You get one human - you - plus 999 stable, named AI inmates and officers running the same rooms, jobs, meals, incidents, emergencies, relationships, and economy, saved on the device.

Every AI decision comes from the current game state and legal moves, using text that ships inside the app: no cloud model, no chat, no ads, and no data collection. This is the whole game, not a demo of it.

Online persistent institution

Sign in with a verified AutoSecureLogin account and enter a living 1,000-resident institution shared with other people. The server owns room presence, who is eligible to be targeted, gang membership and rank, fight participants, protected property, mail timing, and credit transfers, so nobody can invent an ally, drag in someone from another room, or rewrite a result.

Rooms, movement, tension, conversations, arguments, staff orders, and NPC fights are synchronized for everyone in them. Come back later, or on a different device, and you re-enter the same placement with the same character, not a fresh one.

Local Star - nearby play

One phone hosts a complete 1,000-resident institution and nearby phones join by scanning a QR invitation on the host's screen - no internet, no account, and no cloud server involved. Both devices confirm matching authentication digits before anyone connects.

Each accepted visitor takes over one anonymous AI slot and becomes a permanent resident of that host's world: when they walk away, the character stays and the host keeps running it, and reconnecting on the same device reclaims the same resident, name, role, appearance, location, and history. The invitation secret dies when hosting stops.

Screens

From the current builds.

Bars or Badge Lite on an Android phone - the officer's house from 0.68.0, and the rest from 0.67.0, the build before it - then Bars or Badge 3D 0.6.0 from its own test runs.

Bars or Badge Lite 0.68: the officer's house before the count: the bedroom, the uniform on the door, and the doors to the next rooms — The officer's house before the count: the bedroom, the uniform on the door, and the doors to the next rooms

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: three ways to play, chosen before anything else — Three ways to play, chosen before anything else

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: build the person who walks in — Build the person who walks in

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: the room you are in, and you in it — The room you are in, and you in it

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: the room from overhead: everyone in it, coloured by what they are to you — The room from overhead: everyone in it, coloured by what they are to you

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: everyone acts inside the same thirty minutes — Everyone acts inside the same thirty minutes

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: what this window offers, and what each choice pays — What this window offers, and what each choice pays

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: see the consequence before you commit — See the consequence before you commit

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: the receipt afterwards: exactly what changed — The receipt afterwards: exactly what changed

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: breakfast comes first: the chow hall or your locker — Breakfast comes first: the chow hall or your locker

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: a commissary of 100 illustrated foods — A commissary of 100 illustrated foods

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: staff go two ways, and neither one is a favour — Staff go two ways, and neither one is a favour

Bars or Badge Lite 0.67: the endings you have to earn — The endings you have to earn

Bars or Badge 3D 0.6.0

Bars or Badge 3D 0.6: the inmate's screen in the cell: the ID card, the count times, and this half hour's kite — The inmate's screen in the cell: the ID card, the count times, and this half hour's kite

Bars or Badge 3D 0.6: the officer's tactical screen on the tier: the post, the rounds, the doors and this window's orders — The officer's tactical screen on the tier: the post, the rounds, the doors and this window's orders

Bars or Badge 3D 0.6: a dayroom full of residents, each one somebody you can walk up to — A dayroom full of residents, each one somebody you can walk up to

Bars or Badge 3D 0.6: the officer's home: a 1,200 sq ft ranch at night, where the morning starts and the evening ends — The officer's home: a 1,200 sq ft ranch at night, where the morning starts and the evening ends

Bars or Badge 3D 0.6: online too, the officer wakes at home before the count, and the orders wait at the post — Online too, the officer wakes at home before the count, and the orders wait at the post

The institution

A thousand residents who keep living when you close the app.

Bars or Badge is a persistent prison-life role-playing game: Bars or Badge Lite on Android, and Bars or Badge 3D on Android and Windows. You create one character and live their whole institutional life from one side of the bars or the other: an inmate working a job, holding a cell, building a crew and a reputation, or a correctional officer running a post, writing the reports, and climbing a ten-step command ladder that ends at Headquarters Investigator.

The institution around you holds 1,000 residents, normally 952 inmates and 48 officers, spread across 161 hand-illustrated rooms in fifteen zones. Every one of those residents has a name, a body, a job, a schedule, a private history, and an opinion about the people they keep running into. There is no final turn and no score screen. The career only ends the way a real one would, and only if you get that far.

1,000resident slots in every institution
952 / 48inmate slots and officer slots per institution
4 x 250housing blocks and their capacity
11 x 96 seatschow pulls through the Main Chow Hall, and seats per pull
161connected, individually illustrated rooms
15institution zones tracked for control
240independently authored event types
21event domains

The rest of the arcade

Five more worlds, each with its own voice.

One More Knock

There is a door on your porch that was not there yesterday. Knock on it.

A warm, deadpan neighbourhood ritual. You knock, and five neighbours decide whether to answer - each with their own rhythm and their own reasons. Earn Echoes, collect twelve authored Block Postcards and twelve distinct parcel reveals, and style your porch as the street starts recognising you.

Choose online or offline before you play, and leaving mid-round no longer loses the round: the exact last knock and every neighbour's response comes back exactly as you left it. Two-player pools online, friendly AI neighbours off.

Probably Weather

Every spoon in Building C points north. Somebody has to file this.

You work for the Department of Unlikely Explanations, and impossible events are a scheduling problem. Open one incident from twelve authored cases, choose the Department's first explanation, and build a readable five-statement case file out of 180 context-bound mutation combinations and three physical stamps.

Every closure has to still be about the object, the place and the people the incident actually started with - nothing generic, nothing recycled. Your draft survives an app restart, and the archive keeps every case you closed. Five-player relay online.

Please Take a Number

You are number 03. The bell is about to change what that means.

Queue politics played completely straight, as important public business. Advance, Hold or File, spend and earn favours, raise a shield, and read the next of seven deterministic Bell rules before it fires. Every move produces a clean receipt in causal order: what you did, what any pass did, which public rule changed the line, and where you ended up - no hidden math and no unexplained jumps. Service Grade persists, receipts survive a restart, and four-player queues run online.

Static Club

Four receivers, five bands, one broadcast nobody can source.

An asymmetric listening puzzle. Each player's receiver sees different evidence - cadence, repetition, number structure - across a signal-specific five-band spectrum, and only by pinning field notes and combining them do you recover one of ten fully authored broadcasts, each a coherent miniature story with its own clarity-specific transcript.

The game refuses to invent a decode before four real notes exist, so a guess never turns into a false reveal. QSL archive cards keep what you recovered. Three-player circles online, adaptive AI receivers off.

Unclaimed Baggage

Tall teal, dented, rerouted, and it sounds like paper. You have four claim tags.

A tactile airport collecting game built on readable evidence. Eighteen clue-rich suitcases with fixed, unrerollable contents hold 24 authored artifacts arranged in 12 Travel Twin pairs, and the visible clues - origin, shape, condition, weight, sound - are all published before you spend a tag.

What a bag shows and what inspection reveals are kept deliberately separate, and the AI claimants have to cite the same visible clues you can see. Your cabinet, open inspection and latest matched record all survive a restart. Three-player arrival belts online.

Get the games

Free. No ads. No account needed to play alone.

Every version is a direct download rather than a store listing, and each one is kept in one place on our server: the Lite on the Games website, the 3D builds here. Android asks once whether to allow installs from your browser, and Windows warns that the 3D build comes from an unknown publisher. Each file lists its exact size and SHA-256 so you can check that what you downloaded is what we built.

Lite · Android 8.0 or newer · 0.69.0

Bars or Badge Lite

For a standard modern phone take the first; if it will not install, take the second. Both are the same version.

Lite for Android · 147 MB Universal build · 170 MB

Bars-or-Badge-0.69.0-arm64-resumable-test.apk · 147,460,988 bytes
SHA-256 5e3ad60bb99fffdab68f9a314f738d080aa6b073472f5a6094976008b39903cd

Bars-or-Badge-0.69.0-test.apk · 169,519,161 bytes
SHA-256 33218e1ada9a203e87247ab656232c0bd91f46e284f3a7b115651663c9244e3d

3D · test build · 0.7.0

Bars or Badge 3D

Android needs a 64-bit (arm64) phone and about 3.5 GB free to install. On Windows, unzip the whole folder anywhere and run BarsGame.exe: it needs 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, a graphics card with DirectX 11 or later, and about 7.6 GB once unzipped.

3D for Android · 1.65 GB 3D for Windows · 1.42 GB

BarsOrBadge-3D-Android-v0.7.0.apk · 1,654,952,771 bytes
SHA-256 6a03eb9be125078ae95d0a33d55543a373a887af0c231920b6f4f98689c07a9f

BarsOrBadge-3D-Windows-v0.7.0.zip · 1,418,079,448 bytes
SHA-256 1d4b01021be8bca1049cf46de4714102dffdd5913af9e83a37e87b810d589be3

New in Lite 0.69.0 and 3D 0.7.0: Your online character now has a generated life story: a brief and chapters tied to the personality you choose, your character's name and body, and what happens to them. Choosing a different base or completing the personality questions refreshes the story. Family visits, family support, completed classes and officer career milestones feed the character's lived history.

Bars or Badge Lite 0.69.0 is version code 75, package com.autosecurelogin.barsorbadge2d, built against API 36 with a minimum of Android 8.0 (API 26), and signed with the project's test certificate (SHA-256 f607c2afc5c62627e33c72588e4210698ded626be6f97cba2a5812ce184d38b1) under APK Signature Schemes v2 and v3. It installs over Lite 0.68.0 and keeps its careers. It installs beside the old Bars or Badge 0.61 rather than over it, so a 0.61 offline career does not carry over.

Bars or Badge 3D 0.7.0 is the Unity game, version code 7, package com.autosecurelogin.barsunity.dev: a development build for arm64 Android that installs over the previous 3D test build, and an unsigned release build for 64-bit Windows. Both versions play against the live match server, 0.67.0.

Not on Google Play and not on any app store. Nothing in either version can be bought today: commerce is in test mode, live charging is off and Play Billing is not enabled, so the currency packs and mail tokens in the catalogue are not chargeable.

What you should know before you install

The game is not on Google Play. Installing it means allowing an APK download from a website, and Android will warn about that. Some people will not do it, and it is better to say so than to hide it.
None of these builds is store-signed. Android treats them as apps from an unknown source, and a future store-signed build will not upgrade in place over them. The 3D Android build is a development build, and the 3D Windows build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen asks before it runs.
The Lite draws its people from 96 stock figures, one for each sex, stock body and skin tone. Hairstyle, face shape and cosmetics are saved with your character but not drawn into the scene yet.
Nothing can be bought. Commerce is in test mode, live charging is disabled, Play Billing is not enabled, and checkout is hidden from the normal build. Any pricing or currency-pack language on this site would be a promise, not a product.
Local Star nearby play is not yet at parity with online. A returning joining player's privately earned credits, experience, health, discipline, inventory and property are not imported back into their career; a joining player's tactical property and vitals are not mutated; and a connected human target does not get an accept/refuse/defend prompt.
Schedule advancement for a joining player and organization-dependent local actions fail closed with an on-screen explanation. A commissary purchase made on a joining player's phone does not reach the host yet, so the host gives the money back while the item stays.
The 1,000-resident figure is the saved population, and most of them are AI. It is not a claim of 1,000 phones connected at once. For Local Star nearby play there is no fixed limit on joining players in the code, and real capacity depends on the host phone and the local transport, so we do not quote a number.
The screenshots: the Lite's officer's house captured from 0.68.0 on an emulator and the rest from 0.67.0, the build before it, and 3D 0.6.0 from the build's own test runs. Neither version of this release has been through acceptance on a physical phone yet.
The 3D builds are large: the Android APK is 1.65 GB and runs only on 64-bit phones, and the Windows build is about 7.6 GB once unzipped.
Server push notifications do not reach Lite 0.69.0 yet.
Online, the Lite's officer is at home only for the morning before the count; the evening at home is offline in the Lite, and in 3D both ways.

Questions

Straight answers.

How much does it cost?

Nothing. Both versions are free to download and there is nothing to buy inside them - no purchases, no currency sales, no store checkout, and no ads anywhere. Offline play never contacts a server at all.

Do I need an account or an internet connection?

Not for the full game. Offline mode runs the complete career against 999 AI residents with no sign-in and no connection, saved on your device. Nearby play over a scanned invitation also needs no account and no internet. A free AutoSecureLogin account is only required if you want to enter shared online institutions, add friends, or send mail, in either version. There is no guest mode online.

Why isn't it on the Play Store?

It is an early access game and it installs directly from this site instead. That means Android will ask once whether to allow an install from your browser - the standard prompt for any app that does not come from a store.

Every download's exact size and SHA-256 hash is published on this page so you can check the file you got is the file we built. The finished Bars or Badge 3D is planned for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Android; Lite stays a free direct download.

Which phones and computers does it run on?

Bars or Badge Lite runs on any phone on Android 8.0 or newer: the main download is built for standard modern phones, and a larger universal build is there for anything the main one will not install on. Both are the same version.

Bars or Badge 3D needs a 64-bit (arm64) Android phone, or 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 with a DirectX 11 graphics card. Our layout checks were done on simulated devices rather than a physical phone, so if something looks wrong on yours we genuinely want to hear about it.

Is there chat? Can other players harass me?

There is no chat in this game, by design. The only player-to-player text is private mail between approved contacts or people who shared an institution, and it is length-limited and delayed by a real hour. You can block anyone, friendship needs the other person's approval, and your email address is never shown to another player.

Do I have to play as a criminal?

No. The officer career is a full, separate game with its own fifteen duty posts, its own ten-rank command ladder, and its own ending. It is not a difficulty setting or a side mode - it is the other half of the product. And the officer path itself splits: you can build an unimpeachable record, or take the offers that keep arriving and see how long that lasts.

Does the world keep going when I close the app?

Yes. Every slot you are not in is run by the simulation, so residents keep working, eating, patrolling, arguing and getting into incidents whether you are there or not. In online institutions the whole population advances at each shared deadline; offline, it advances on your device. Nothing about your career is deleted for being away.

How much time does it need?

One real decision per thirty-minute window, and you never wait on anyone else - everybody acts inside the same clock, independently. If you cannot get to it, a saved default action resolves for you at the deadline and your phone can nudge you once beforehand. You can also just move around, talk, read mail and check your locker without spending your action at all.

The rest of the arcade

Five more worlds, each with its own voice.

One More Knock, Probably Weather, Please Take a Number, Static Club, and Unclaimed Baggage are shorter native games, playable offline against authored computer opponents, with friends and synchronized play when you sign in.

Open the arcade

Anonymous download counts

The public site counts selected download and product-launch clicks without identifying visitors. The dedicated counter stores only the day, site, action and a predefined label. It sends no form data, page URLs, IP addresses or browser details to the counter log and uses no cookies, browser storage or third-party analytics.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track disable counting. Logs rotate daily with 14 retained rotations. A click does not prove an installation or completed download. See the platform privacy policy for other service processing.