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You are a bill. Almost none of you make it. Find out where you die.
- Skill this builds
- Trace a bill through both chambers, predict which stage kills it, and identify the specific vote threshold each stage requires.
- About
- About 6 minutes · Standards: C3, NCSS · Plays offline
You are a bill moving through Congress. Steer up and down with the arrow keys, a finger, or by tilting your phone. Collect votes. Amendments make you heavier but bring votes with them. A poison pill ends you. At the end of each stage there is a threshold, and if you are short, you die there — which is what happens to about 96% of bills.
The thresholds in this game are the real ones: 218 of 435 in the House, 51 in the Senate, 60 to break a filibuster, and two thirds of both chambers to override a veto. The obstacles are a game. The arithmetic is not.
Playing as
Your Beacon
House Committee. Where bills go to die. The chair decides whether you are ever scheduled at all, and most chairs never schedule most bills. Congress.gov — statistics for the 117th Congress
What everything on the screen is
- A voteOne member persuaded. Collect enough and the stage lets you through.
- A blocA caucus moving together. Worth twelve votes, and rarer, because blocs want something in return.
- An amendmentBrings votes and makes you heavier and slower. This is the real trade: every amendment that buys support also makes the bill harder to move.
- Poison pillAn amendment written to make the bill unpassable, added by people who want it dead but do not want to vote against it. Touching one ends the run.
- FilibusterA wall you can only pass with 60 votes. Below that you bounce, and bouncing costs you time you do not have.
- The calendarA Congress lasts two years. Anything not passed when it ends is dead and has to start over from nothing in the next one.
The point
Most bills die in committee, and now you know what that sentence means from the inside. The number worth carrying out of this: in the 117th Congress, 17,817 bills were introduced and 365 became law. That is about two in a hundred. When somebody tells you a bill has been introduced, they have told you almost nothing — the question is which committee it went to and whether the chair intends to schedule it.