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 30 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 — and every year the world does something of its own that you did not choose and cannot preview. Your system decides what all of it 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. It saves on this device, so a decade can be played in as many sittings as you like.

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

You get one state, twelve years, and twenty-six economies to pick from — including the one you already believe in.

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

Twelve years is longer than one sitting. This one saves on your device after every year you finish, and opens exactly where you left it.

12 years, about 12 sittings of 2–5 minutes — roughly 8 to 17 days end to end. That is a modeled estimate of length, not a measurement and not a schedule.

THIS IS A MODEL, NOT A PREDICTION. The numbers behind every meter were invented to make the trade-offs legible in an evening. 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.

How much of this can be different

10 shared problems and 26 system strains were written by hand. Beside them sits a vocabulary of 322 occurrences across 10 domains, drawn rather than scripted, correlated rather than independent, and some of them leaving consequences that outlast the year. The number that describes an evening is the small one: at most 36 situations in a decade, out of what is written. Every number tuning that draw is modeled rather than measured, and is declared as such in the game's registry entry.

Beyond the border there is a second vocabulary of 147 things that happen BETWEEN polities, across 6 domains. It is drawn only in years nobody is governing — a year with somebody in the chair answers what arrives at the border, and the arithmetic of a governed year never charges it. At most 2 of them land in any one of those years. Counted from data/games/occurrences-world.json, scoped to the domains this game routes. None of it is a claim about a real place, and no real country, government or international body appears anywhere in it.

Replay a run

Every finished run shows its seed under “What varied this run”. Two people typing the same seed are dealt the same twelve years — the economy, the budget, and the answers stay yours. Type one here to face the exact years somebody else faced.

Seed

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.