Games

The Draw

You don't pick your system. You don't pick where you start. Twenty-four years — make do.

Skill this builds: Reason about economic systems from the inside rather than the outside: compare how different allocation mechanisms handle the same shock, distinguish the effect of a system from the effect of a starting position, and notice how much of an outcome was decided before the first move.
About: About 15 minutes · Standards: C3, NCSS · Plays offline

Name your nation. Then two things are drawn for you and neither is a choice: the economic system you live under, and the position you were born into. You get twenty-four years and five things you can do with each of them — work it, learn something, organise, take the risk, or ride it out. Watch four numbers: your household's capital and standing, and the nation's output and cohesion. They do not move together, and finding out when they come apart is most of what this game is for.

No system in this game is the right answer, and the balance is verified rather than asserted — a test re-implements the engine and searches thousands of runs to confirm that no system wins reliably and that no single strategy always works. Systems are named for how they decide who gets what, never for a country or a party, and every one carries a real failure mode alongside its real strength. Run it several times: the point of the game is the comparison between runs, not any single one.

Playing as

Your Beacon

Change

Name your nation

This is the only thing you get to choose. Everything after it is dealt.

Nation name

Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

The point

Play it six times and watch what changes. Almost certainly the thing that moved your outcome most was not the system you drew and not the moves you picked — it was the position, drawn before you touched anything. That is not a claim that effort is pointless; the same position produces very different endings depending on what you did with it, and you can check that yourself by replaying a seed. It is a claim about proportion, and proportion is the part that arguments about economics usually skip. Most people are not born holding land. Six in a hundred were, in this game, which is roughly what the weighting says. If you drew that and did well, you now know something about your own good fortune that no lecture would have taught you. If you drew the bottom and clawed to the middle, you know something too — and you know exactly how much of it was you.