One of modern society’s pain points is the problem of having so much tasty food – which is usually bad for you – at hand, which leads to people gaining too much weight. Even digital people in video games seem to have a problem with keeping their bellies in check and tend to overindulge. So, as a new entrepreneur in a busy city, what are we going to do?
Well, we monetize this problem, of course!
Fitness Club Tycoon places you in the role of a fitness club (which I’ll just refer to as a gym from here on) where you’re tasked with making a luxury place for people to tire themselves out. Fitness Club Tycoon isn’t strictly a business management game – instead, it more closely resembles idle clicker games, such as Cookie Clicker or other such fare. That’s not to say you should just leave the game though; there’s a distinct pleasure in watching the gears of your business turn like the wheels of a well-maintained treadmill.
While there are no actual win or loss conditions in the game, savvy entrepreneurs can read on to see what options are available to them to both maximize profit and improve customer experience in their gym. More sweaty customers means more money, after all! So without further ado, let’s delve into our Fitness Club Tycoon guide to discover how you can maximize your profits!
Build A Good Gym
Well, that’s an obvious first step. But it’s not enough to just have good coaches and glitzy ad campaigns. Unless your gym can deliver on its promises, the money will be slow. That’s why it’s very important to continually upgrade your facilities – happy customers are spending customers, after all!
Room Upgrades
Admittedly, it’s quite easy to run a gym at the highest level of management. Just stuff some equipment in a room and wait for people to come in. Put some mirrors, blast some music, hire some coaches, and done!
Well, no. As your gym expands and grows, you’ll have more and more facilities that you’ll need to upgrade to improve the customer experience, get higher ratings, and rake in more money. Here’s an overview of some of the more basic rooms you’ll have and what each of them do, as well as what improving each of them can give you and your customers.
Reception
The reception area is where you tempt passersby into sweating for your profit. It’s here that you can increase the flow of customers by increasing the number of queues, as well as manage and select your ad campaigns.
You can tap on the desk to hire more receptionists (with enough build value) as well as upgrade them to increase their processing speed. As this is the first step in getting customers, do try to prioritize upgrading this as soon as you can, and buy a new receptionist as soon as the option is open to you.
By tapping the screens in the middle of the hall, you can upgrade your advertising, which increases the amount of customers that appear per minute. Note that you must have processing facilities for these people – if your receptionist is too slow or too overworked, some people will choose to just leave!
You can also select a media channel to advertise in, with paper being the cheapest and TV being the most expensive. The more you pay, the bigger the customer flow and the longer the effect will last. With that in mind, it makes sense to always pick the most expensive option available to you.
There’s one last option for your ad campaign, and that’s through social media. In a bit of meta-fun, you can’t pay for this option with in-game money, and you’ll have to watch an ad. But don’t mistake this for being the worst option as social media lasts 20 minutes and gives +40% customer flow, which is the biggest bonus by far.
On a side note, you can also tap courses in the management screen if you’d like an overview of your gym – your customer flow rate, your busiest rooms, and your total income per minute.
At the far end of the reception hall are the locker rooms, where customers will get changed into more appropriate attire. Just like the reception desk, you’ll want to upgrade these quickly so that your customers don’t clog up. Remember: the more people sweating at once, the more you earn!
The Running Course
The running course room is the first exercise you’ll gain access to, and while it’s primarily made for running, in practice it seems to be built more for cardio exercises – but don’t quote me on that. As a rule of thumb, all other rooms in your gym follow the same upgrade pattern as the running course, so you can use this as a template for improving your facilities down the line.
As running on the treadmills serves as a warm-up to other gym activities, this is the first room that your customers will visit. Thus, it’s in your interest to not only improve the facilities themselves, but also to increase the number of treadmills the room has, as well as decrease the amount of time each customer needs to spend in the room.
To do all these, tap anywhere in the room to bring up the upgrade screen. The top panel will upgrade the facilities, and each breakpoint (roughly 20 levels) will unlock a new course effect for this room. The left panel increases the number of machines the room has – up to 9 in this case – and the right panel with the circle timer shortens the amount of time customers need to spend in the room.
Upgrading the number of facilities as well as customer time spent per room is very important as customers will get tired of waiting if lines are too long in any room. While losing customers at a room line isn’t as bad as them walking out of reception, these should still serve as a warning sign that you should deal with these lines before they become too much of a problem.
Every Other Room
As I mentioned earlier, pretty much every room in the gym, bar the reception, uses the same upgrade template as the running course – you can tap on them to bring up the upgrade screen, and you can choose to invest money in better services, more customer spaces, or faster customer interaction time. Whether it’s an actual aerobics room, a swimming pool, or a restaurant that serves only fatty food to make people spend more (no, this isn’t a thing but I wish it was), they follow the same upgrade formula of quality, space, and time.
Raise Your Build Value
The first time I saw the gold star, I thought it was premium currency. To my pleasant surprise, it’s not. The gold star in the upper left of the screen represents your build value, which is a rough estimation of your gym’s total progress in both building new facilities and upgrading existing ones.
Build value is important as it dictates what you can and cannot build. The higher your build value, the more rooms you can build, and the better your facilities can be. And you can’t lose it either, as it’s more of a score, not a currency.
Raising your build value is similarly easy – put up new rooms and improve existing ones. This will not only net you a higher build value, but also more income per minute, leading to a much better gym, and a much richer you!
Keep Your Customers Happy
Businesses are a give-and-take relationship: give your customers good value for their money, and they’ll repay you with their loyalty, their money, and by spreading your gym’s good name.
Lazy Customers
Customers that are currently exercising can become, as the game puts it, lazy. This is represented by a tired, sweaty red face. Lazy customers are put on a timer, and if that timer expires, they’re quitting.
Luckily, remedying this issue is simple – just tap on a lazy customer to motivate them again. You’ll also receive notifications on the right-hand side of the screen if there are lazy customers, so you’ll be able to remedy these situations faster.
Hire Coaches
You can add a lot of value to each room by hiring specialists for each room, who are all referred to as coaches in the game.
Hired coaches provide passive effects to their respective rooms, which can include improving that room’s performance (like increasing weight loss and increasing stamina gain), increasing success rates, and increasing room use speed. In addition, coaches can also motivate lazy customers on their own, so your hands won’t be too full. The downside to all this is that coaches must be hired and upgraded with Gems.
Weight Loss Goals
Your gym’s ultimate goal is not only to make money, but also have customers lose weight. Weight serves as a good measure of customer satisfaction. It’s also a tangible value too – the more customers reach their weight goals, the higher your reputation becomes, and the more stages you unlock.
As you play the game, you’ll eventually unlock a weighing scale where customers will go to check their weight – side note, yes, get more scales and make them weigh themselves faster so that this part gets sped up.
To help customers reach their weight goals, you’ll need to upgrade the quality of your rooms (that’s the top panel in the upgrade menu) as every 20 levels or so, that room gains an upgrade that helps people lose more weight. However, you can’t just spam upgrades in the same room as customers do need diversity to reach their weight goals. Compounding this is the decreasing success rate of losing weight with higher room upgrade facilities.
You can also view your customers’ in-depth information by tapping on the person icon in the lower right. Here, you’ll be able to see each type of customer’s specialization, which influences which exercise room they’ll get the most out of. You’ll also be able to see their target weight, as well as redeem rewards for helping them achieve each milestone.
These milestones don’t just give you valuable money and gems, but also give you reputation points, which are used to gain bonuses from the people standing outside your gym.
Stack Cards
Fitness Club Tycoon also has a card system in play, where you can collect cards to put up fancy new facilities.
By collecting enough cards, you can gain access to powerful bonuses that aren’t available anywhere else, such as increasing offline benefits, doubling income from certain rooms, increasing customer move speed, and so on.
However, you’ll need to collect enough of a card to activate its bonus – having just one copy isn’t worth much. On the other hand, this means that even your common cards will remain relevant as collecting even more copies of them will improve their boosts.
Card Packs and Lucky Coins
To get cards, you’ll need to buy card packs. These are available by tapping the cards icon in the lower right of the screen.
Buying packs requires you to pay lucky coins, which you can get by tapping on the fountain in your reception area. The fountain passively generates coins, but you can also opt to watch ads to gain a hefty amount of coins at once.
With that said, don’t expect to get fantastic bonuses from cards off the bat. You’ll need patience and dedication to max out your lucky coins, and more than a little luck to actually draw the cards you want. Since so much of this is based on factors you can’t control, I suggest investing in card packs, but not focusing too heavily on them.
Grab Gym Freebies
Fitness Club Tycoon has a ton of freebies up for grabs – so much so that it’s quite easy to lose track of them at times. Here’s a list of the free stuff you can get to help your gym give its 110%!
Login Bonuses
Fitness Club Tycoon does have login bonuses – one per day for a week for new players. These bonuses come in the form of money, Gems, or cards, which are all invaluable for a new gym tycoon.
Golden Eggs
The Golden Eggs minigame can be accessed by tapping on the golden egg icon on the lower left of the screen. In this minigame, you’ll be presented with 4 eggs, of which you can choose one to crack open and get the prize inside, which is usually either cash or Gems.
Don’t think you can just run in and grab everything though: some eggs will contain a bomb that will end your current run. However, you can continue your run by watching an ad (and if you don’t watch an ad, your run gets reset!)
The golden eggs minigame has a cooldown of 15 minutes, which you can also skip by watching an ad. As it provides a somewhat reliable way of earning Gems, I highly suggest playing this minigame whenever you can.
Roulette
The Roulette minigame is as simple as it sounds – spin the wheel, get a prize. Do note that you can also get 30 Gems from finishing this minigame, though you do have to watch an ad after receiving each prize. To access this minigame, just tap the roulette icon on the lower left of the screen.
Challenges
Challenges will sometimes appear on the left side of the screen, usually heralded by red exclamation points. These are simple value-comparison events, where your gym’s stats (such as coach level, income per minute, etcetera) are compared against other players. Even if you lose, you still get something – prior to entering a challenge, your estimated reward will be shown, and you can then use that information to decide if you want to enter or not.
Tasks
Tasks in Fitness Club Tycoon are akin to quests from other games. These tasks will give you a rough idea of what to do, as well as serve as a way to guide you towards opening more rooms and unlocking more of the game’s features. To open the task menu, tap on the notepad icon in the lower right of the screen.
Tasks are well worth completing as they give you money and Gems. You also have the option to double your task completion rewards by (you guessed it) watching an ad.
Investors
This bearded fellow that occasionally appears in the upper right of the screen heralds the arrival of investors. While most investor meetings usually involve lunch, discussions, expensive cocktails, and copious amounts of backstabbing and political machinery, investors in Fitness Club Tycoon are a lot more lenient: all you have to do is tap a button to watch an ad, and hey presto – free money!
Note that investors will also come to your rescue if you ever run out of money. If you try to spend money that you don’t have (ie, try to upgrade something you don’t have the funds for), you’ll be given a chance to watch an ad for a quick infusion of cash. This does use up the investor that appears in the upper right of the screen, so you can’t double dip.
Acceleration
Instead of investors, you might get a clock banner in the upper right. This signals an acceleration chance, which will (as its name suggests) simulate the passage of time at double speed for a certain period.
Since Fitness Club Tycoon operates on passive income per second, this will boost your income by quite a bit – the projected income you’ll gain will be listed below the button. Of course, nothing in life is free, and you’ll have to watch an ad to use this bonus, but it’s well worth the few seconds you’ll spend.
Buses
You might also get buses as a banner in the upper right corner. Like investors and acceleration chances, these offer a one-time bonus, this time of a large amount of customers. This is perhaps the most finicky but also the most lucrative of the bonuses – if your gym can handle extra traffic without annoying people with long waiting lines, a bus can be even more valuable than the other bonuses. If, however, your processing is slow and customers have to wait in long lines, you might want to upgrade some of your rooms before taking the bus.
Blind Boxes
A helpful robot outside your gym will offer you blind boxes every 5 minutes. Upon tapping the gift icon that appears over the robot’s head, you’ll be given the option to choose between three boxes. While each of them contains a cash reward, the amount you’ll get is random – with one box having the most, one box having the least, and one box in the middle. Sometimes though, there will be other items in these boxes, such as Gems.
If you’re unsatisfied with the box you chose, or just want more money, you can also watch an ad which will give you the rewards of all three boxes. Needless to say, always do this.
Double Time
Up to six times a day, you can choose to watch an ad which will give you double benefits for 10 minutes. This bonus is exactly what it sounds like: it simply doubles the amount of money you make for 10 minutes, allowing you to quickly upgrade your gym and rake in even more cash.
Watching ads for double time has an added bonus of giving you 30 Gems once you’ve watched all six ads. These gems are refreshed daily, and while they’re admittedly not much, they can add up. As you can only have 1 hour of double benefits per day, I highly suggest you use this bonus to your advantage.
Idle Rewards and Managers
Fitness Club Tycoon doesn’t require the game to be on at all times. Even when it’s closed, the game simulates the passage of time and will continue earning money and slimming customers down. However, if you don’t have a manager, only up to 2 hours of slimming will be saved.
On the plus side, you get to keep all the money your gym has made while you were gone, and you can even opt to double it by either watching an ad or paying in Gems. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is a really good idea, especially if you’ve been away for a while.
Your Gym, Your Rules
Ultimately, Fitness Club Tycoon is a very relaxing business sim because, as I mentioned earlier, there’s no actual win or loss conditions. With that in mind, you can play the game as you see fit. Want to force customers to only use one room? Go ahead. Never get more lines? You’re the boss. It’s your business after all, and you’re under no pressure to overachieve (or underachieve).
That concludes my guide to Fitness Club Tycoon, and I hope I was able to help you make sense of all the panels and ads the game likes to throw at you. If you have anything you’d like to add, let me know in the comment area!