Worth Your Weight in Gold

Somewhere in the will, between the ashtray collection and the caravan nobody wants, there's a line with your name on it: three boxes of old SIM cards, expired credit cards, and a handwritten note.

"The chips are gold. Worth your weight in it. Love, Uncle Swampy xxx"

He wasn't wrong. He was just optimistic about the quantities.

Every card comes out of the box grubby, sticky and decades old. Pull one from the tray and work it across the desk:

• Spray the grime to loosen it up

• Brush the wet muck away, then cloth the card to a shine

• Cut around the chip with a craft knife. Steady hands, neat corners

• Peel the chip free with tweezers

• Melt it down in the crucible and watch the gold pool

No timers. No fail states. Just a card, a desk lamp, and the quiet satisfaction of doing a fiddly job properly.

Hundreds of cards, dozens of countries

Uncle Swampy got around. Pay-as-you-go SIMs from networks you half remember, gold cards from banks that never quite existed, and blister packs that have been waiting since 2004 to be popped. Over 460 hand-painted designs, every one a loving parody. Spot the ones from home.

Gold is money, and money buys better kit. Knives that forgive a wobble, cloths that lift film in one pass, a crucible that doesn't sulk when you let go. Upgrade tool by tool and watch the desk fill up with things Uncle Swampy would have called "a bit posh".

Every chip leaves a plastic offcut behind. Keep them. There's a wall in the room, and a growing pile of pastel plastic, and only you know what the mosaic is going to be.

The desk sits in a room Uncle Swampy hadn't tidied since the nineties. Between shifts, clear the floor, mop, and paint, and slowly turn a grubby spare room into the workshop of a small-time goldsmith.

• A cozy, single-desk simulator. Sit down, play a shift, get up whenever

• Satisfying, hands-on cleaning and cutting with real feel to it

• 460+ parody SIM and credit cards from around the world

• A gentle upgrade loop with no pressure and no punishment