First Pass

THE QUEUE IS ENDLESS · THE SHIFT IS NOT
A document review horror game by an actual eDiscovery attorney. Plays in browser, desktop & mobile. ~15 minutes. Free.

OFFER OF ENGAGEMENT

Your bar card cleared conflicts. Congratulations. You are a contract document reviewer on State ex rel. Okafor v. Meridian BioWorks, Inc. — a qui tam action alleging falsified drug-stability data. The pay is $4.00 per document. The shift runs 9 to 5. The protocol will change mid-shift, by email, effective immediately, and nobody will make you read it.

Stamp each document RESPONSIVE, NOT RESPONSIVE, or PRIVILEGED. Quality control audits every decision in real time. Six citations ends the engagement — and contract reviewers are not walked out gently.

The documents will tell you a story. Your job is not to care.
Most people manage.

Somewhere around Wednesday, your workstation will begin to disagree with the record. IT says it's a display driver. The protocol says the record is the record. One of them is lying.

FEATURES (ESI PROTOCOL §§ 1–7)

§1 THE JOB. Papers, Please-style stamping against a live review protocol — term hits, date ranges, privilege screens, source exclusions, hot-doc flags. Every trap in this game is a real coding trap, written by someone who has issued the citation.

§2 THE DESKTOP. Your workstation is the game: review platform, mail, chat, protocol, ledger, and Blue's Law Dictionary are separate programs. Screen management is survival — the amendment that changes your job arrives while you're mid-document, in an app you don't have open.

§3 THE CLOCK. Endless procedural queue, finite shift. Every second re-reading is a document you didn't bill. The parking-deck email and the smoking gun pay exactly the same. Sit with that.

§4 THE DICTIONARY. Every legal term is a blue link with a plain-English pop-up definition, backed by 28 full entries in Blue's Law Dictionary, Revised 4th Ed. (1994). You will leave knowing what privilege actually is. ("Lawyers are not garlic. Their presence alone wards off nothing.")

§5 THE NATIVES. Some documents carry attachments the protocol never mentions. Download them and the raw data sits on your desktop — and while it's there, the numbers in your documents stop holding still. There is a delete button. The game remembers if you use it.

§6 THE MYSTERY. Five days of documents assemble a fraud in front of you — and on Friday, one email tests whether the protocol or your manager owns your stamp. Five endings. One footnote worth framing.

§7 THE OTHER THING. Documents that are not in the collection. A clock that reads 8:88. A face on the screen during the power cycle. IT assures us it is a driver issue. Disregard anything the workstation shows you that is not in the collection.

CONTROLS & PLATFORMS

Desktop: mouse, or keys 1 (Responsive) · 2 (Not Responsive) · 3 (Privileged) · H (Hot flag) · Esc (skip intro).

Mobile / iOS: full touch support with a phone-OS shell — app switching, notification banners, thumb-zone stamp bar. On iPhone: open in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen for the full-screen app with its own icon.

One HTML file. No install, no account, no analytics, no server. Nothing leaves your browser — which, given the subject matter, felt important.

CONTENT NOTE

Contains horror elements, brief screen-flicker and flashing effects (the game honors your system's reduced-motion setting), themes of workplace pressure and professional-ethics distress, and one extremely accurate depiction of contract-attorney compensation. All persons, firms, and pharmaceuticals herein are fictional. The billing model is not.

WHO MADE THIS

FIRST PASS was designed and written by a practicing senior eDiscovery attorney — the privilege traps, the mid-stream protocol amendments, and the exact feeling of document forty-one at 4:40 PM are drawn from the real work. It began as an honest question: what does the law actually feel like from inside the queue?

"Having actually done the work, it really does encapsulate the tedium." — the developer, playtesting his own game

Inspired by Papers, Please. Part of a planned anthology of honest law-job simulations. Essays on AI supervision and legal judgment at Reasonable Distrust.

SDS SYSTEMS · © 1996, allegedly · the record is the record