Pivot is absolutely not a cube rails game. Except it is.

As much as Tom swore they didn't set out to, Pivot is the answer to the eternal question: “if we introduced supply and demand and action cards into a cube rails game, would the result be any good?” Well, I would've spent my whole time at Origins playing it if I didn't have coverage obligations, so yeah?

Players are the genre’s typical investing hypercapitalists trying to make the most money, taking turns spending cards from their hands to either buy stock in or take actions on behalf of companies. You can plop down factories that'll produce goods, hire salespeople to offload them, and drop links in a company's shipping route to connect the two, but most importantly, that company will toss you a salary for your trouble. Of course, you're gonna want to invest that right back into stock, which you can then drive the price of with sales. Sales can be as simple as a company using production and an agent in the same region to meet a demand, but in order to sell through as many of a company's agents as possible, you'll probably need to use another company's production and/or shipping in a joint venture. Sure, you'll split the profit, but if late-stage capitalism has taught me anything, it's that the only thing worse than making diminished profit is making no profit. Eventually, players will run out of cards, productive things to do, or just decide to drop out early because it's advantageous, and get tossed a handful of rule-breaking catalyst cards. Between rounds, regions’ demands are randomized, often creating disconnect between the greatest routes of profit with the new board state and companies’ old board state. If this happens to a company you're heavily invested in, you'll probably want to spend a few turns reconfiguring its infrastructure. I'm sure there’s a five-letter word for this that could've made a good title for this game, even: Shift? Adapt, maybe? Idk. 

The major infusion of player capital in Pivot occurs when a company hits a threshold of its own capital, exiting the game and becoming dormant except for as a passive participant in joint ventures. Combined with more successful companies paying players a higher salary when acting on their behalf, Pivot naturally accelerates towards its end state of enough exits.

Pivot's Kickstarter campaign is kicking off soon, so go and follow their page, y'all!