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Six things need money. Money arrives slowly. Something is going to break.
- Skill this builds
- Run a public budget in real time, predict which deferred obligation fails first, and calculate why fixing a thing late costs several times what fixing it early would have.
- About
- About 8 minutes · Standards: C3, NCSS · Plays offline
You are the treasurer. Revenue trickles into the pot at the bottom. Six obligations fill up behind your back — click one to spend the pot on it. Let a bar fill completely and it becomes a failure: it costs several times more to fix and it permanently cuts your revenue. Survive eight years.
The multiplier at the heart of this game is real and it is the reason infrastructure decays everywhere. Repairing a road before it fails costs a fraction of rebuilding it after. The exact ratio varies by asset and by study; this game uses a conservative figure and names its source. Everything else — the speeds, the six categories, the shocks — is invented to make eight years fit in eight minutes.
Playing as
Your Beacon
What can differ between runs
Two of these are drawn each time you take the ledger, and the HUD names them:
- A lean revenue year The tax base came in soft this cycle. Revenue arrives more slowly, all run long.
- A reassessment year The rolls were revalued upward. Revenue arrives faster — and every obligation is still filling behind you.
- An audit finding The auditor found deferred work the books had understated. Every bar fills faster than the record said it would.
- A hard season Storms, surges and rate moves come closer together this run.
- A quiet stretch The shocks hold off longer than usual. The bars still fill — quiet is not the same as safe.
- A hot construction market Contractors are booked out and bids run high. Each funding action buys a little less repair.
The point
Nothing here was a surprise. Every bar was visible the whole time, filling at a rate you could see, and you still could not fund them all — because the pot fills slower than the obligations do. That is not a failure of attention or of virtue, and it is the actual condition of every public budget in the country. The politics of a budget is not about waste. It is about which of six visible, legitimate, filling bars you are prepared to let fail, and almost nobody says that part out loud.