Show HN: I recreated Papers Please but you're deciding which YC startups to fund
bolau
204 points
82 comments
November 11, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (18 comments)
slg
This feels icky considering the topic of the original.
tuberreact
damn at least here i can be post economic
jimbo456
This incredible; i will have a lot of fun with this
contingencies
Missing the music :)
butlike
I mean, technically you didn't recreate anything. You had the LLM pattern recognize something that already existed and it copied it. I don't mean to sound harsh, but create something new.
rmah
So nostalgic. I had fun declining founders because of their various frauds/schemes.
smlavine
Doesn't credit the original creator at all in the actual website?
Fraterkes
Would be interesting if we could plot the average amount of time spent on the creation of showhn stuff that gets to the front page, over the past years.
logicallee
This looks awesome! Playing it now. It's a really good idea. Edit: I looked at a few pitches, I thought they were very realistic. For the Pointer acquisition it only listed the requested round size, not the valuation, which I think is really important for investors. It didn't completely make sense to me why they would need an investment for an acquisition, but when a company gets an acquisition offer is a pretty good time to raise money. Feedback: I'd recommend using a different branding rather than Y, since YCombinator invests at the seed stage using standard terms, and doesn't make follow-on investments as far as I know. (I could be wrong.) It's better if you make it a hypothetical VC rather than use YC's branding. Game was very fun, thanks for making it.
exolymph
Shameless plug, if you think this is funny you will also enjoy merging startups to create new fever-dream companies! https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/ For example, Tailscale meets Supabase: https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/m/supabase+tails...
tiborsaas
I found the document management way too confusing. There's no clear game loop and I'm kinda lost what signatures mean, what the other documents are what success is. Papers please has a much simple mental model.
achandra03
Maybe I'm stupid but I quit after 5 minutes because I had no idea what was going on with the documents.
epolanski
UI is too little, can't really read it.
idiotsecant
Quite a slopcomplishment.
ayyagari-testre
This is a good way to explain the term sheets and the things to check.
knoxg
The primary game mechanic of stamping 'Pass' to fail a funding application is a bit confusing; should label that stamp 'Fail'/'Decline'/'Deny' or even 'Do not fund'. Pass as in to 'pass on the opportunity to fund' i.e. to not agree to fund, is not the same as Pass as in 'passed the criteria for funding' i.e. to agree to fund. To many people, Pass and Fail are antonyms, not synonyms.
x-complexity
1) It does too much too quickly. There's no acclimatisation ramp. 2) The examination area's too small. Almost every document is too large & has multiple pages. Navigation through documents is broken, with some not draggable back to the booth if clicked on. 3) Question responses are likewise too small for their dialogue boxes. They need to be in one box, either with larger boxes or smaller fonts.
LandenLove
It's a neat idea, but it's obviously vibe coded with no playtesting. The character dialog advances automatically and too quickly. One aspect of papers please is actually being able to read the character dialog and deduct if they are lying. There is also the word vomit of text everywhere. There was no thought put into the flow of reading the text on the documents.