Who is the best CDO?
Run the data and AI of a company through your inbox, and what a fork can customise (gauges, reply impacts, email chains).
The player is the new Chief Data Officer (CDO) of a large company. Emails come in from every department: data breaches, data quality, data protection, HR, strategy, budget, AI agents. Every reply moves four gauges. A management game played in an email client, solo, in 5 to 8 minutes, shipped in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.
Play it now, for free and without an account: the Who is the best CDO? game page.
Rules
- Four gauges: the CDO budget and the company profit (money), data quality and reputation (0 to 100%). Budget, data quality and reputation never go below zero: a reply that would bring them there is greyed out, with its reason ("Not enough reputation"). Profit has no limit.
- A year is 12 emails, with no timer: the player reads at their own pace. The HUD shows "Email 3 of 12".
- The inbox never overflows: while 3 emails are waiting, nothing new arrives. Otherwise an email arrives 19 to 25 seconds after the last reply, and 2 seconds after it when the inbox is empty. Emails are drawn from the skill practised least so far: a year trains every skill.
- Some emails are urgent (a quarter of the arrivals at most, never before the 4th email): the player has 45 seconds to open it. Once it is open, the countdown stops ("Urgent: you are on it") and they can read calmly. An urgent email not opened in time is a data breach and the game ends. Good data quality keeps urgent emails away; a good reputation unlocks the emails that bring budget.
- Each email offers three replies. Before sending, only the cost of each reply (the budget it takes) is shown: to choose, the player has to read the email and the replies. Once sent, the outcome shows with its four impacts and, when it was not the best reply, the best reply and its impacts.
- A reply can trigger other emails (the regulator investigating a late notification, the AI agent pilot to scale up…). The outcome announces it ("Legal will get back to you about this decision"), the follow-up arrives a few seconds later with a Follow-up badge, and it quotes at the top the reply that triggered it.
- After the outcome, Next email opens the urgent email waiting, otherwise the oldest one. After the last email of the year, See my year review leads to the end screen, where the board gives its rating based on the company profit.
- The CDO cat keeps the player company: it gives advice, cheers a best reply and worries when an urgent email is waiting.
- Keyboard: up and down arrows to move through the inbox or the replies, Enter to open an email, 1 to 4 to reply (or to open the n-th email of the list), Escape to pause. On a narrow screen, the list and the email alternate.
Scoring
The value of a reply adds the money it brings (budget and profit, turned into points by the
moneyPerPoint rule: $10,000 = 1 point) and its data quality and reputation points. On each
email, the best reply is worth 100 points, the worst 0, the others in proportion. When
several replies share the best value, each one scores 100 points. An urgent email left
unanswered scores nothing.
The maximum is 100 points per email of the year (capped by the number of emails that can arrive and, with a duration, by what it lets arrive). The score shown is recomputed by the server from the replies: gauges, triggered emails and greyed-out replies are replayed.
Skills measured
Each email trains a leadership skill:
| Skill | Emails |
|---|---|
data.leadership.incident: handling a data incident |
breaches, emergencies |
data.leadership.privacy: complying with data protection |
GDPR, regulator |
data.leadership.quality: steering data quality |
quality, master data |
data.leadership.value: investing for value |
strategy, budget |
data.leadership.culture: bringing people on board |
HR, training |
data.leadership.ai-adoption: adopting AI responsibly |
AI agents |
What a fork can customise
Rules (Settings mode of the editor):
| Rule | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
emailsPerYear |
12 | Emails of the year: the game ends once the player has handled them. |
maxWaiting |
3 | Emails waiting beyond which nothing arrives (never a burnout). |
firstEmailSeconds |
2 s | Arrival of the first email, and of the next one when the inbox is empty. |
emailEverySeconds, emailJitterSeconds |
25 s, 6 s | Gap between the last reply and the next email, drawn between 19 and 25 s. |
urgentSeconds, urgentSharePercent, urgentFromEmail |
45 s, 25%, 4 | Time to open an urgent email, chance an arrival is urgent, first email that can be. |
impactsBeforeReply |
cost | Impacts shown before sending: none, the cost only, or all four gauges. |
sessionDurationSeconds |
none | Longest game; without a duration, the year only counts emails. |
currency |
USD | Currency of the money gauges (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF). |
moneyPerPoint |
10,000 | Money worth one gauge point in the scoring. |
resources |
$1,000,000, $0, 0%, 0% | Starting value of each gauge. |
passingScorePercent |
50 | Pass mark sent to the LMS. |
The currency only changes the gauges and the impacts shown: the amounts written in the emails stay those of the content (dollars by default). Rewrite them in the content if your fork changes currency.
Content (Content mode of the editor, in the source language of the fork; other languages are translated by file):
- Emails: sender, subject, body (one paragraph per line), category, skill, urgency, can open the game, draw weight, arrival conditions (minimum reputation, maximum data quality), "only when a reply triggers it". The list shows for each email its best reply and when it can arrive (at the start, anytime, after a reply, never: a follow-up email that nothing triggers).
- Replies: text, outcome, impacts on the four gauges and emails it triggers (three at most). The replies table edits impacts in bulk, column by column.
- Chains: the Graph view of the emails shows which email triggers which, with an accessible list of the same links; a link to a deleted email is flagged.
- Gauges: the name of the four gauges and their mission line on the welcome screen ("Training budget" instead of "CDO Budget", for instance).
- Categories (name and alert banner), endings, board ratings (profit threshold and message) and every interface text, screen by screen.
Appearance: brand colour (buttons, headings, background gradient), highlight colour, the welcome mascot (the CDO cat; add poses and they take turns). The logo and name of the fork's brand show on the welcome screen and at the top of the inbox ("Your organisation presents").
The studio refuses inconsistent content: two emails, or two replies of the same email, with the same identifier, a reply that triggers an unknown email or its own email, no ordinary email that can arrive, two ratings at the same threshold. A follow-up-only email that nothing triggers is accepted (while you link it): the list shows it as "Can arrive: Never".
Reviewing the content
The 45 default emails are listed by category in games/best-cdo/content-review.md (generated by
bun run content:review in the game package), in every language shipped.