---
title: "What an April Fool’s Joke Taught Me About CDR Operations"
date: "2026-04-08 00:00"
authors: "Brian Jamieson (Principal Scientist & TEA Guy)"
topic: "Company update"
url: "https://charm-industrial.vercel.app/blog/charmville"
excerpt: "What started as an April Fools' joke became a fun way to explain what Charm Industrial actually does - or at least try to!

CharmVille is a browser-based factory simulation game where you build a carbon removal operation from scratch — sourcing biomass, running pyrolyzers, routing products by truck and rail, injecting bio-oil underground, and managing the economics of the whole thing. It was built in a week, mostly by an AI, and deployed to the entire company on April 1st with a Slack message that read: \"Commissioned by Peter to diversify Charm's revenue streams into the thriving $180B video game sector.\"

Nobody was sure if it was real. It was real.
"
image: "https://a-us.storyblok.com/f/1019545/512x286/960df75448/charmville.png"
---

# What an April Fool’s Joke Taught Me About CDR Operations

What started as an April Fools' joke became a fun way to explain what Charm Industrial actually does - or at least try to!

**CharmVille** is a browser-based factory simulation game where you build a carbon removal operation from scratch — sourcing biomass, running pyrolyzers, routing products by truck and rail, injecting bio-oil underground, and managing the economics of the whole thing. It was built in a week, mostly by an AI, and deployed to the entire company on April 1st with a Slack message that read: *"Commissioned by Peter to diversify Charm's revenue streams into the thriving $180B video game sector."*

Nobody was sure if it was real. It was real.

*Saving the planet is hard work. Sometimes we like to have fun!*

## The Serious Part Behind the Joke

Building a game about your own operations turns out to be a surprisingly effective exercise in **systems thinking**. It may not come as a surprise to you, but some of us nerds at Charm are actually quite into Factory games (think Factorio, or Satisfactory). Extrapolate Charm's operations enough, squint, turn your head 45 degrees to the left, and you've got something similar with a bit higher stakes. Every game mechanic in CharmVille maps to a real operational decision at Charm:

**Pyrolysis temperature tradeoffs.** In the game, a slider controls temperature from 300–700°C. Lower temperatures produce more biochar. Higher temperatures produce more bio-oil and syngas. Players learn intuitively that this is a real engineering choice — there's no "right" answer, just tradeoffs between product mix, CDR quality, and operating cost. Syngas above 20% yield runs a generator that offsets your electricity bill. Below 20%, it all goes to drying. Of course at Charm we know what specific pyrolysis configuration we're aiming to achieve, but those engineering decisions in the game are real decisions that we optimize strategically.

*Trying to maximize your bio-oil yields? Try a nice middle of the road temperature!Do those local industrial offtakes look like a good char destination? Low and slow!*

*Power prices got you down? Turn up the heat and make some gas!*

**Logistics matter more than you'd think.** Truck depots dispatch 4 trucks at 50 mph. Rail spurs cost $50k plus $10k per tile of track. A cross-map haul that looks cheap on the build menu becomes expensive when you factor in $3/mile transport. Players discover — usually the hard way — that where you put things matters as much as what you build. Charm's real operations face the same constraint: biomass sourcing radius, processing site selection, and injection well placement are all fundamentally commodity scale logistics problems.

*Trains are stuck to the rail lines but can move a lot of cargo at a lower cost than trucking. Trucks support local and overflow logistics needs. With rail we can connect distant pyrolysis operations to pre-existing injection wells at a reasonable cost.*

**Geology is the hidden variable.** A subsurface geology layer determines how fast each injection well can pump and how much it can hold. Deep sandstone is a CDR firehose. Shale is a trickle. Players have to scout the geology overlay, plan well placement, and eventually spread across the map as early reservoirs fill up — exactly the kind of geographic expansion that real geological sequestration demands. If you don't manage your production and sequestration rates, you can find your operation backing up with inventory.

*Favorable injection geology near a city? You lucky duck! Maybe stay away from that shale to the north of the map otherwise your injection operations will struggle.*

## What Players Actually Learned

We tracked every game session. Some patterns emerged that map surprisingly well to real operational insights:

**Bio-oil injection is the bottleneck.** The most common cause of in-game bankruptcy? Building pyrolyzers without enough injection wells. Bio-oil backs up, the pyrolyzer stops, char stops being produced, revenue stops, and daily CAPEX charges eat through your cash. The game's fail screen diagnoses this: *"Bio-oil backed up with no injection wells. Pyrolyzers stalled — no char, no income."* At Charm, injection capacity planning is one of our most critical operational constraints. The game teaches this in about 10 minutes.

**Clustering saves money.** Players who placed pyrolyzers near each other, wells near pyrolyzers, and storage adjacent to everything got CAPEX discounts of up to 40%. Scattered operations bled cash on transport and missed the co-location benefits. This mirrors Charm's real approach to site design, in which shared, small, and repeatable infrastructure dramatically reduces per-unit cost.

**Climate change is real — in the game.** Weather worsens over time: more droughts, stronger storms, longer frost periods. But every 10,000 tonnes of CDR the player removes rolls back the severity. Your operation literally calms the weather. It's an unsubtle metaphor, and it works.

At the end of the day we still wanted a game that was mostly winnable. In real life, these factors keep us on our toes.

## How It Was Built

CharmVille is a single HTML file. It was originally distributed as a file within Slack on April Fools’ Day, but has been added to a public GitHub page for your amusement (<u>[link here](https://charmindustrial.github.io/charmville/)</u>). The entire game is ~250KB, which is smaller than most images on this blog. Almost half of this is the Title Screen image, making the actual game itself trivially small.

It was built almost entirely through conversation with Claude Code over the course of about a week. The codebase is ~3,300 lines of vanilla JavaScript rendering on an HTML5 Canvas. The economics are (extremely loosely) based on Charm's TEA models, abstracted enough that no proprietary data made it into the game but grounded enough that the strategic tensions feel familiar to anyone who's worked in carbon removal. At the end of the day it was still supposed to be a bit of a joke and a game that people actually felt like they could win. Who knows, maybe there will be a Gold Edition with an ultra-realistic Business Survival mode in the future? Difficulty levels moderated by nominal CDR credit sales price? Don’t tempt us with a good time!

Five US regions offer different challenges: the Midwest is flat and cheap but logistics are long. The West Coast has premium carbon credit prices but tougher geology for injection. Mountain West and the geologic region formerly known as the Western Interior Seaway have good subsurface storage opportunities, but the dry climate changes biomass availability significantly. Each region teaches different aspects of the same operational puzzle. At the end of the day these “regions” are just seeds for map generation consideration, the constraints are relatively similar between each playthrough.

*Select a region for a different randomly generated map layout, or try your luck with random!*

At a startup like Charm we're very conscious of our runway. While it would be wonderful to hire an army of software engineers to bring our crazy ideas to life, that isn't a realistic possibility. But AI tool adoption is helping us have some fun in terms of learning opportunities, tracking tools, and other operational improvements that can be implemented by each and every Charmer. Compounded, these small improvements let us move faster than we would otherwise be able to achieve.

**There's another benefit we didn't anticipate: goofing around is a learning opportunity.** CharmVille's weather system uses Markov chains to model state transitions — clear skies shift to cloudy, cloudy shifts to rain, rain can escalate to storms, and so on, all driven by transition probabilities that shift with the seasons. That's not just a game mechanic. Markov chains for weather aren't much different from Markov chains for equipment operating state (normal, impaired, shutdown), which is exactly the kind of reliability modeling we need for real pyrolysis infrastructure. Building the game gave us a low-stakes sandbox to experiment with these techniques before deploying them in systems that actually matter.

## Why This Matters

We're not pivoting to game development , but we learned something building CharmVille that we think is worth sharing:

**Carbon removal is hard to explain.** The biomass sourcing, pyrolysis chemistry, logistics optimization, geological storage, and financial modeling that make up Charm's operation are each individually complex. Together, they form a system that's genuinely difficult to communicate — even to smart, motivated people who want to understand it. One of the first additions to the game (v1.00 to v1.01) was actually the tutorial because while some Charmers figured out what to do immediately, others needed a bit more intel. Even now it probably needs work, but this adaptive workflow really helps us to move quickly and address concerns as they arise.

A game does something that slide decks can't: it lets you **make the decisions yourself** and feel the consequences. When your char silo catches fire because you were too greedy with storage, or your injection well fills up and you realize the good geology is on the other side of the map, or a drought wipes out your biomass yields and you're suddenly scrambling for cash — those moments create understanding in a way that no amount of explanation can match.

We're not sure what comes next for CharmVille. Maybe it becomes an onboarding tool. Maybe it becomes a recruiting conversation starter. Maybe it stays an April Fools' joke where the learnings were the friends we made along the way. Whatever happens we’ll be out here growing the CDR industry, one injection well and one pyrolyzer at a time. 

*Failure is not the end for CharmVille! Take your learnings and try again on another playthrough.*



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*CharmVille is open source and playable at *<u>*[charmindustrial.github.io/charmville](https://charmindustrial.github.io/charmville)*</u>*. Scores are automatically reported to management.*

*If you're interested in working on the real version of these problems — biomass logistics, pyrolysis optimization, geological storage, and carbon accounting — *<u>*[we're hiring](https://jobs.lever.co/charmindustrial)*</u>*.*