Games

Run the State

Pick an economy. Try to make it work. Find out what it makes hard.

Skill this builds: Run a budget under a hard constraint, predict which obligation fails first when you cut it, and identify the specific weakness of the economic system you chose.
About: About 20 minutes · Standards: C3, NCSS · Plays offline

Choose one of twenty-six economic systems and govern with it for twelve years. Every year you split one hundred points across four obligations, then answer one problem. Your system decides what that costs you. Nobody wins this game — you either finish the twelve years still governing, or you hand the state to somebody whose economy was working.

No system in this game is stronger than another. Every one is described by ten traits that sum to exactly zero, so whatever a system is good at, it is worse at something else by precisely the same amount. That is checked by a test, not by feel — apps/api/tests/test_run_the_state.py. If you can find a system that is simply better, that is a bug and it should be reported as one.

Playing as

Your Beacon

Change

Choose an economy

Twenty-six of them, every one described in full at the systems survey.

Economic system

Money follows work. When the economy runs, the treasury is full; when it stalls, you have nothing to spend.

How you raise money. You tax what the economy produces. Income rises and falls with Work more sharply than under any other system.

What defence costs you. Your neighbours expect about 32 points of defence. Under that and they notice.

Read the full description, its record, and the argument against it →

Choose a scale

THIS IS A MODEL, NOT A PREDICTION. The numbers behind every meter were invented to make the trade-offs legible in twenty minutes. They are not forecasts, they do not come from any dataset, and no real economy has been simulated here. What is real is which trade-off each system faces — each of those is sourced, and every source is named on the card where it appears. If this game tells you a system 'works' or 'fails', it is telling you about this model. Read the full description of any system at /systems.

The point

You have now argued with one economic system for twelve years from the inside. The useful thing to carry out of it is not which one 'won' — none of them did, and the game is built so none of them can. It is that every system you could have chosen made one obligation cheap and another one expensive, and that the argument between them is really an argument about which trade you would rather be stuck with. Read the one you played at /systems, and then read the one you would never have chosen.