About the game

Underground Evolution is a free crime game you play in your browser, set in a city where the 1920s never ended: speakeasies behind grocers' shops, trains full of smuggled liquor, a newspaper that prints your name when you do something big, and a thousand ways to get rich or get caught.

From the gutter to the Don's chair

You step off the train with a battered suitcase and the price of one night in a boarding house. The first money is small and dirty: a wallet lifted on a tram, a crate carried down to the docks after dark, a few hours sweeping up at a garage that fixes cars nobody asks about. The gym turns you from a kid into somebody people step around. A first fight, a first night in the cells, a first week when the rent is paid.

Then the city starts to notice. A gang takes you on as a soldier and gives you a corner to watch. You learn when the beat cop looks the other way and what the fence pays for a stolen watch. You buy a car and a better coat, then a room above a shop, then the shop. Rivals test you: some you pay off, some you put in hospital, and one puts you there. The Evening Racket prints your name for the first time, in the court report.

Years in, you are a made man with a crew of your own, a business or two with a front and a back, shares on the stock exchange and property across three districts. Gangs go to war over turf, and the family you helped build fights the ones you grew up robbing. Your record is in the paper every week, and the Don asks you to his table.

And one day the chair at the head of that table is empty, and the city is waiting to see whether you are the one to take it.

What you do

• Work the streets: pickpocketing, robberies, smuggling and heists. Bigger jobs pay more and risk more, and some need the right tools and a cool head.
• Train and fight: the gym builds you up; then you fight, mug and put bounties on rivals, or square up to the city's own hard cases.
• Join a family: rise through a gang from soldier to Don, hold turf, raid and go to war.
• Make money work: the Bazaar, property, businesses and the stock exchange, with a bank that pays interest and a city that takes its cut.
• Live a little: a night out, a drink too many, a home to improve, a mood that follows you into the next job.
• Make the front page: The Evening Racket, written by players and the city's own newsroom, reports what everyone gets up to.

Fair play

Everything in the game can be earned by playing. Gold, bought with real money, only buys convenience and looks: power is never for sale, there is no exchange between cash and Gold, and nothing in the game can ever be cashed out. The rules are short and worth a read.

For adults

Underground Evolution is for players aged 18 and over: it is a story of crime, with fights, bootlegging, gambling themes and strong language, and none of it is real. If something in the game ever feels wrong, Report is one click away on every profile, message and story.

Who makes it

Underground Evolution is made by Cool Monkey Studios. It began as an old browser game with a loyal crowd, and this is its rebuild from the ground up: the same city, new everything.