Domestique: Cycling Career

You are nineteen, riding a steel bike, with fifteen spanners to your name and no contract. Somewhere above you is a peloton that does not know you exist yet. Domestique is a pro cycling career simulator about the long road — the training blocks nobody watches, the race programme you cannot afford to ride in full, the sponsor who wants you at a race you would rather skip, and the one rider who has not forgotten what you did to him in the spring. RIDE THE RACE, NOT A MENU Races play out in real time. Sit in the draft and save everything, ride the front and burn, or attack and find out whether you had the legs. Crosswinds split the bunch. Cobbles punish the back. On a mountain stage with nothing left you can slip into the gruppetto and just survive — or attack out of it and pay for it. A SEASON YOU CANNOT RIDE ALL OF Fifty-two weeks, forty-plus races, and nowhere near enough race days for them. Commit a programme, honour your sponsor's mandates, and peak for the race you chose months ago. A real fitness and fatigue model decides whether you arrive flying or cooked. A PELOTON THAT REMEMBERS Around two hundred riders with their own careers, form curves and opinions of you. Steal a win, talk trash in the press tent, and someone starts marking your every attack — for years. Share the work in a break and you make an ally who will tow you back when you puncture. CLIMB THE LADDER, THEN LEAVE IT Local club to Continental to ProTeam to WorldTour, one contract at a time. Then retire and start a dynasty with what your predecessor left you — or move into the team car as a directeur sportif and win from behind the wheel. THE WEEKLY LEGEND STAGE One seeded time trial per week, identical for every player on earth, ridden on an identical rider. Your time makes a share code. Compare it with anyone. Domestique is set in a sport with a history. Somebody will eventually offer you something, at the worst week of your worst season, and phrase it as help. You can say no — a clean career is fully playable and the game keeps a record of the fact — or you can find out what the other road costs. Everything you buy creates a person who could talk about it. Nothing you take is free, and the record book remembers all of it. Every rider, team and race is fictional. Free to play with ads.

New app icon and cover.