Rejoice!
A house-of-worship management simulation, by Tinderbox Labs.
Build a house of worship. Gather a people. Keep the faith.

Release: Black Friday, 27 November 2026
Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux
Store: Steam (exclusive)
Price: $9.99 on Black Friday (27 November 2026); $19.99 launch price through Martin Luther King Jr. Day
       (18 January 2027); $24.99 thereafter
Website: https://tinderboxlabs.com/rejoice
The Complete Guide: https://tinderboxlabs.com/rejoice/guide
System requirements (Windows): minimum Windows 10 64-bit, 4 cores at 2.5 GHz, 8 GB RAM, integrated
       graphics (Intel UHD 620 or better) with Visual effects on Low; recommended a discrete graphics
       card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 or AMD Radeon RX 560, 2 GB, or better) and 16 GB RAM
Contact: hello@tinderboxlabs.com

In a sentence
Design a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, a gurdwara, or a shrine tile by tile, furnish it
for one of eighty traditions in nine faiths, and run it week after week as every person in the
congregation decides whether to stay.

Short description
Build a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, a gurdwara, or a shrine tile by tile, and run it
week after week. Eighty traditions in nine faiths, each with its own building, calendar, and way of
life; every person in the congregation simulated, deciding whether to stay.

Long description
Rejoice! is a management sim about a house of worship and the people who make it one.

Lay it out tile by tile: walls, doors, and windows, twenty-six kinds of room, 193 furnishings,
and roofs, steeples, domes, minarets, stupas, shikharas, torii, and temple roofs with upturned
eaves. Then run it. Hire the staff, recruit the volunteers, set the budget, keep the boiler going
through January, and watch everyone who comes through the door decide whether they'll be back.

Choose from eighty traditions in nine faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism,
Sikhism, Jainism, Shinto, and Chinese religion), each modelled from its own sources and described
as it describes itself. They aren't skins. A synagogue keeps Shabbat from candle-lighting on
Friday to nightfall on Saturday, faces east to its ark, and in most movements needs a minyan of
ten to read the Torah. A mosque turns to the qibla, prays on carpet rather than in pews, gathers
for Jumu'ah on Friday and for five daily prayers that move with the sun, and gives zakat in
Ramadan. A Theravada temple houses monks, and its families feed them before noon; a Zen center
sits at dawn and dusk. A Latter-day Saint ward meets for a two-hour Sunday block under a bishop
called from its own members. A Baptist church wants a baptistry and a vote; the Orthodox stand
before an iconostasis; Quakers sit facing one another in silence.

Not every house of worship is a congregation that gathers once a week. A Hindu temple opens at
dawn for darshan, families coming when they like, and its priests perform pujas at the temple and
in families' homes, for a fee. A Shinto shrine welcomes visitors one by one all day, and by the
thousand at New Year; a Chinese temple's devotees bow at the great censer, ask the god with moon
blocks, and renew their lamps each Lunar New Year. A gurdwara serves langar, free food for anyone
who comes, cooked by volunteers and eaten sitting in rows on the floor, and reads the Guru Granth
Sahib through in relays for 48 hours when a family asks. A Jain center's members change into puja
clothes to enter the shrine, and bid for the honours of Paryushana.

Every person is simulated: their household, age, health and mobility, faith and membership, and
seventy-eight things that make them glad or sorry they came, from the heating and the sightlines
to whether there was a minyan, whether there was langar, and whether anyone said hello. Then there
are a hundred dilemmas, conflict that can split a congregation, seventeen scenarios, a sandbox with
milestones, and ten years of weekly reports to read it all by.

Rejoice! doesn't tell you what to believe, and no faith is the "right" one. It shows how each one
works.

What's in it
- Eighty traditions in nine faiths: forty-four Christian (among them the Latter-day Saints and
  Community of Christ), five Jewish, five Muslim, seven Buddhist, ten Hindu, one Sikh, two Jain,
  three Shinto (with Konko and Tenrikyo), and three Chinese, each modelled from its own sources:
  what its worship centres on, its rites, who owns the building and who chooses the leader, how
  people belong and what they give, and what they expect of the building and of each other.
- Every word from the tradition: church, synagogue, mosque, temple, mandir, gurdwara, or shrine;
  pastor, rabbi, imam, abbot, pandit, or granthi; sermon, d'var Torah, khutbah, dharma talk, or
  katha; Sunday school, Hebrew school, Dharma School, or Bala Vihar.
- Each faith's week and year: Sunday, the Sabbath, Shabbat, or Jumu'ah; daily minyanim and zazen
  at dawn and dusk; Shabbat's services and the five daily prayers timed by the sun where you build;
  temples and shrines open all day, with visitors coming one by one; 53 calendars by the moon and
  the sun, from the Christian year to the Hebrew and Islamic months, Hindu festivals reckoned by
  the moon where you build, the Sikh and Jain years, and the Chinese lunar months and solar terms
  (the High Holy Days, Ramadan and the Eids, Diwali, Vaisakhi, Paryushana, Lunar New Year, Obon,
  Vesak, Tết). The main gatherings play out at a minute a second; the daily ones and the open
  hours pass quickly unless you choose to watch.
- Each faith's building: 26 kinds of room, among them a beit midrash, a mikveh, a wudu room, an
  imambargah, monks' quarters, a sachkhand, and a changing room for puja clothes; 193 furnishings,
  from pews, altars, and fonts to the ark and bimah, the mihrab and minbar, prayer carpet, the
  butsudan, meditation cushions, murti shrines, the havan kund, the palki, the kamidana, and the
  great censer; steeples, domes, minarets, stupas, pagoda towers, shikharas and vimanas, a
  gopuram, a gilded dome, torii and paifang gates, and tiered temple roofs; twelve building styles;
  51 materials and finishes; a lot that turns to face the qibla; three lots with zoning in fourteen
  American regions, each with its own weather and its own sunrise and sunset.
- Each faith's congregational life: the minyan; a women's gallery or a mechitza; monks who live
  on site; a bishopric called from the ward; langar, free to all, sponsored by a family and cooked
  by volunteers; heads covered and shoes left at the door; 168 rites, from baptism and bar mitzvah
  to the nikah, the sacred thread, and taking refuge; congregations whose names come from their own
  heritage.
- Rites asked for: families book pujas, blessings, and readings, at the temple or at home, when a
  priest is free, and pay a fee; long rites, like the Akhand Path's 48 hours of reading, kept in
  relays by staff and volunteers.
- Each faith's giving: the offering and pledges, tithes, dues, High Holy Day seats, zakat passed
  on to those in need, and dana; fees for rites, amulets, the offering box, lamps renewed each
  year, sponsorships, life membership, and honours bid for at auction; Islamic financing where
  interest is forbidden; kosher and halal kitchens, and vegetarian ones without eggs, onion, or
  garlic. Against it, salaries, utilities, insurance, the mortgage, budgets, and everything that
  wears out, from boilers to the bus.
- Staff to hire, from a pastor or a rabbi to a cantor, a muezzin, a Qur'an teacher, a resident
  monk, a priest from India, ragis to sing kirtan, a miko, or a Daoist priest; volunteers to
  recruit; 73 ministries, rentals, 52 fundraisers, small groups, schools, and vans and buses to
  bring people in.
- Every person simulated: their household, age, health and mobility, faith and membership, and
  78 things that make them glad or sorry they came.
- 100 dilemmas, approvals, and conflict; seventeen scenarios, and a sandbox with milestones for
  any tradition.
- Ten years of weekly reports, charted and tabled.

The traditions
Christianity (44), including the Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, and Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches,
  Lutherans, Episcopalians and Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals,
  Quakers, Mennonites, Adventists, the Latter-day Saints, Community of Christ, Jehovah's Witnesses,
  Christian Science, and Unitarian Universalists.
Judaism (5): Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Chabad-Lubavitch.
Islam (5): a Sunni Islamic center, a Twelver Shia Islamic center, the community of Imam W. Deen
  Mohammed, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, the Nation of Islam.
Buddhism (7): the Buddhist Churches of America (Jodo Shinshu), Soka Gakkai International-USA, a Soto
  Zen center, a Theravada temple, a Tibetan Buddhist dharma center, a Vietnamese Buddhist temple, a
  Chinese Buddhist temple.
Hinduism (10): a Hindu community temple (South or North Indian), an Indo-Caribbean mandir, BAPS
  Swaminarayan Sanstha, the International Swaminarayan Satsang Organisation, the International
  Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), the Arya Samaj, a Vedanta Society, a Chinmaya Mission
  center, Self-Realization Fellowship, a Sathya Sai Center.
Sikhism (1): a gurdwara.
Jainism (2): a Jain center, Jain Vishva Bharati.
Shinto (3): a Shinto shrine, Konko Churches of North America, Tenrikyo.
Chinese religion (3): a Chinese folk temple, a Daoist temple, Yiguandao (I-Kuan Tao).

A note on accuracy
Each tradition is described as it describes itself, and placed where it places itself (the
Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ among the Christian traditions; the Ahmadiyya and the
Nation of Islam among the Muslim ones). Where a body describes itself as standing apart, the game
says so: Konko and Tenrikyo sit under Shinto, and Self-Realization Fellowship and the Sathya Sai
Organization among the Hindu traditions, each with a note on how it describes itself.
Each is a careful draft until people from it have reviewed it; corrections are welcome at
hello@tinderboxlabs.com.
