Schedule 1 is my favourite co-op game of the year because it lets me bully my friends into doing the hard parts for me

I didn’t realise a criminal empire would lead to so many early mornings. Yet, here I am, waking up at 7 am every morning and skateboarding around my regulars, making sure they’ve got enough stuff to get them through the day. The cash from the morning’s take goes to a hole in a wall, and then I float around town dropping off goods like an illegal Uber spin-off, avoiding the cops, handing out samples to would-be customers and stopping home from time to time to make sure I’ve got enough supply to meet the ever-increasing demand.

No, I haven’t taken up a new side hustle. I’d never be able to wake up with that sort of regularity. I’m playing Schedule 1, currently Steam’s best seller, a deal-’em-up that plays like a mix between Stardew Valley and Satisfactory. And it’s a nightmare if, like me, you’re an ADHD riddled disaster that can barely get himself organised enough to click heads.

This is because Schedule 1 isn’t just a game about dealing, it’s also a game about making—a tactile process that involves spreading soil, trimming trees and even tipping little bits of product into baggies and jars. Every little piece of crafting is a mini-game all of its own. And that’s where I come unstuck.

From a growbag in the corner of a hotel room to heat lamps set up in abandoned bungalows, to live the American dream you’ll need to quickly and efficiently optimise your grow rooms, scaling up at lightspeed and managing multiple different strains of product to meet customer’s needs. I am, frankly, terrible at that.

But that’s where co-op, and my friend Robin, comes in. Robin has a preternatural skill for organising that knows no bounds. After playing this for five hours, I’m not entirely certain Robin isn’t running a cartel in his spare time. Even more seriously, I’m not certain Robin has left our in-game production facility for anything more than buying soil and baggies since we started playing.

Somehow, despite our completely different interests, we’re both having the time of our lives. My job is to make sure there’s cash in the ATM and to pick up the shopping list of gear I’m being sent into the world with. I can guess why we need weed seeds, sure, but I don’t know why I have to bring back an inventory full of energy drinks, viagra and horse semen and at this point I’m too scared to ask.

I’ll never have to. We each play to our own strengths. I take most of the risks, using a skateboard and Schedule 1’s warped physics to evade police checkpoints. I deal, I manage our external contractors to make sure they have enough product for our more distant clientele, and I also keep an eye on what’s selling so I can tell Robin what we need more of. In addition to running our sales and project marketing, I’m our chief fun officer, picking up new skateboards, baseball cats or even a couple of comedy hats to keep morale high.

My partner, meanwhile, spends his time growing plants and stuffing them into mixers to make new, wilder, strains. Which is why I’m out there trying to sell things like Dark Bud, Weekend Ass and, er, Strawberry Monkey to my clientele. As someone who can’t order a pornstar martini without getting the giggles, this is intolerable cruelty. It’s repaid though, because I’m the one who sees our clientele go bald. I’m the one who sees them go from pink-eyed baristas to low-gravity astronauts.

The best co-op games are well crafted and let everyone have their own job and own mechanics. Think Operation Tango or It Takes Two. The thing is, handcrafted co-op is hard to make and finite. Sandboxes like GTA Online have their own version in the heists, but Schedule 1 is so wide-open, so desperate to do just about anything it is you desire, it’s refreshing. Yes, we could both grow or both sell, but as we want different things from our games at 9 pm in the evening, Schedule 1 is offering us both what we need without compromise.

The feeling of a loosely defined role is part of why I fell hard for Content Warning too, as my friends often let me play as the camera man, which I often played as a mix of Attenborough-esque documentarian and YouTube monster. But Schedule 1 has a much wider possibility space, such a big range of different activities to take part in, that it feels like I can really get lost in it, picking up the bits I like while leaving those that I don’t to someone else. Running drugs, buying weapons and escaping the cops? That’s my thing. Schedule 1 is letting me do as much of it as I want.

The problem, then, is that there’s one area neither Robin or I want to bother with. Cleaning the labs. I come home each day as the Purge-esque siren sounds, signalling the start of the police curfew that makes it difficult to move around at night. The floor is littered with binbags and detritus from a job well done—by that stage nearly completely unmanageable.

All I’m saying is, we’ve got room for a third if you want to spend your whole time organising a chaotic storage system and picking up trash. Someone has to be into that too, right?