// IN DEVELOPMENT — NOT YET RELEASED

The CISO: Cyber Defense Extraordinaire app icon — a neon shield enclosing a figure in dark glasses, drawn in phosphor green.

CISO: Cyber Defense Extraordinaire

You are the Chief Information Security Officer. The board wants growth, the regulator wants evidence, the budget covers about half of what you need, and somebody is already inside the network. Every turn is a trade-off, and the map tells you what your last one cost.

Coming to iOS and Android. No store listing and no release date yet — the link above just reaches a person.

Diagram of a mission map A schematic of the game's board: a cloud zone at the top, a perimeter DMZ on the left, the internal core at the centre, an operational-technology enclave below and remote sites on the right, connected by links. One core node is marked as compromised. CLOUD DMZ CORE REMOTE OT BREACHED HUB
Diagram — the board's zone structure. Not a screenshot.

At a glance

Missions
67 across 10 acts
Tutorial
7 guided missions
Controls
56 security tools
Languages
6 EN ES FR DE JA PT

What you actually do

// The board

An organisation you can see

The map is the game. Servers, cloud accounts, factory floor, laptops and the people using them, drawn as one estate with the links that actually connect them. Segment it, monitor it, and watch an intrusion travel along the edges you left open.

It renders four ways, and the choice is yours: a hub-and-cluster board, a districted campus, layered planes where the kill chain reads as descent, and a sonar scope where bearing is the zone and range is criticality. The geometry changes; what a marker means never does.

  • Four selectable map topologies
  • Five themes, including a WCAG AA high-contrast one
  • Turn-based — think for as long as you like

// The catalogue

Controls that behave like the real ones

Fifty-six security tools, each with a purchase cost, a running cost and a staffing burden. Sixteen threat actors with their own methods, mapped to the fourteen MITRE ATT&CK tactics.

// The pressure

The budget is the difficulty

Hire, cut, buy, defer, and go to the board when you need more. Thirteen compliance regimes want evidence; the press wants a statement. Your rating is the business's opinion of you, not your tooling's.

// The campaign

Sixty-seven missions, ten acts

A start-up with one server through to an estate nobody can hold. A separate seven-mission tutorial campaign teaches the loop first. Forty-four missions carry a dossier on the real public incident behind them.

// The review

A debrief that tells you why

After each mission your decisions are scored against the NIST NICE workforce framework — the same competency vocabulary the profession uses — with the evidence for each judgement shown, not just a grade.

// Playing it

Phone and tablet, on your own

Single-player, no always-online requirement, and no advertising. Built with Flutter and the Flame engine for iOS and Android. There is no desktop version planned.

Where it is up to

The game is built and the campaign is written. It is not released, it is not in any store, and there is no date — it is in playtesting and polish, and it will ship when it is worth your evening.

If you want to hear about it once, when it launches, write to hello@neuraltactic.com. We keep that list for exactly that and nothing else.