Digital Lab Games X Sostav: "Worked Like Horses" - Office Satire In Telegram Mini-app

Objective

Sostav and Digital Lab Games created a pre-holiday campaign leveraging the Year of the Horse symbol to deliver entertainment during the New Year downtime. The project tackled office culture fatigue and burnout through satirical judgment gameplay, while simultaneously testing mini-app placement within Telegram channels as a new engagement format.

Solution

Players created a custom horse character and took on judging roles, assigning fictional corporate personas to either "vacation" (leisure-focused) or "office" (deadline-heavy) categories based on described workplace behaviors — a reframing of the classic "heaven or hell" judgment mechanic. The game featured daily character rotations requiring player evaluation; points accrued through verdicts, special tasks, and consistent check-ins, with automated point generation from judged characters over time. Push notifications reminded players of new characters and uncollected points. A tiered leaderboard ranked players by total score. Implemented as a 30-day Telegram mini-app embedded in Sostav's channel, the campaign included satirical references to media figures and corporate archetypes.

Results

27% of Sostav's audience clicked through to the game; 15% of players completed core judgment actions. Retention remained stably high throughout the 30-day runtime. Prizes distributed across three tiers: top 3 players received advertising placements on Sostav, 21 winners obtained Sostav School education discounts, and 101 participants won "Titans of Advertising" board games.