The board, the seats, the loop a session runs on, and the line between what the software holds and what a human resolves by hand.
Nobody starts equal. There is nothing to negotiate between identical players.
| Nation | Population | HDI | Regime | In poverty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🏰Malocha | 904.6M | 0.65 | Monarchy | 500M |
| 🏛️Matooka | 108.0M | 0.89 | Parliamentary Republic | 15M |
| ⚡Hamtzutzia | 185.0M | 0.99 | Presidential Republic | 2M |
| ⛈️Marit | 64.4M | 0.31 | Communism | 40M |
Malocha has eight times Hamtzutzia's people and two-thirds of its human development. It needs everything. It also has the leverage of being too big to let fail.
Each nation is a cabinet of four, and every one of them has a different job to lose. A nation doesn't decide anything. Four people who have to agree do.
Owns the decision, in front of three colleagues who each want something else.
The only seat that can see what everything actually costs. Which makes it the seat everyone has to convince.
Negotiates abroad, then has to sell it at home. The two audiences want opposite things.
The only buyer the arms dealer wants, and the only seat that can spend the treasury's money on nothing.
Sells force to anybody. Quotes each nation separately, and nothing stops him telling one what another paid.
Takes 35% of the national tax before his own cabinet spends a coin. The hardest negotiation is domestic.
One seat at the table is working against it, and nobody knows which. Every cabinet meeting is held in front of someone who might be there to lose it.
Most of the negotiating in this game never crosses a border. It happens between four people who share a treasury.
The UN secretary is elected. Open vote, whole table, and the office comes with its own interface and a budget made entirely of what the nations agree to contribute. It is the only power in the game that has to be granted rather than bought, which is why the campaign for it tells you more about a cohort than the vote does.
A season is not free-form. It is a fixed cycle, and the last two steps of it are the only channel through which a player finds out what their own choices actually did.
The broadcast is the feedback loop. It's how inaction becomes visible: the fastest way to land the fact that not deciding is a decision is to read a fifteen-year-old the news the following season.
Not in a rulebook, and not by me remembering who was told what. A login resolves to a role; the role decides what the client will render. This is why the two nation links on the front page show you different worlds.
// a token resolves to a role, and the role selects the interface const role = resolveToken(token); // statements marked secret are filtered out unless you own them const isSecret = s => s.secret === true || /secret/i.test(s.notes); statements.filter(s => !isSecret(s) || isAdmin || owns(s));
The interesting failure isn't a player reading something they shouldn't. It's a player who knows something and has to decide what it's worth to tell.
Before anybody mentions a crisis, the board is already forcing them together. No nation manufactures everything its population needs. Each one produces a subset of the fourteen commodities, and each one is charged for its people's consumption every season whether the goods are on the shelf or not. Importing is not a tactic in this game, it is a requirement, and the trade table is where the real dependency lives.
On top of that sit ten standing world problems. Each has a severity, a set of affected nations, and a cost in Ħ, money that would otherwise have been profit. Nothing forces anyone to pay. The pirates are one of these, not a player: they tax the trade routes by existing, and somebody has to decide whether that is cheaper to pay or to fight.
| Problem | Severity | Affects | Cost to solve |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global Pandemic | Critical | All four | 500,000,000 Ħ |
| Terrorism | Critical | All four | 400,000,000 Ħ |
| Religious Conflict | Critical | Hamtzutzia, Matooka | 300,000,000 Ħ |
| Climate Change | Medium | Matooka, Malocha | 350,000,000 Ħ |
| Mass Migration | High | All four | 180,000,000 Ħ |
| Famine & Drought | High | Malocha, Marit | 200,000,000 Ħ |
| Sea Pirates | Medium | Matooka | 100,000,000 Ħ |
A nation that could feed itself would have no reason to sit down. The scarcity is the invitation; the world problems are only the bill that arrives after.
Worth being exact about this, because it is the part most people assume wrong. There was no turn engine. Nothing in this system reads a declaration and computes what follows from it.
Balances, prices, commodity stocks, production and consumption figures, army inventory, and above all who can see what. It renders a different world per role.
Every consequence in the game is a judgement call, and the judgement is mine. What a broken shipment does to a price, which problem worsens, what a betrayal costs.
I worked through the declarations with it season by season and we built the news flashes, the broadcast and the ledger together. On my approval it wrote the results to the dashboards.
Deals are signed by hand and filed. A contract is worth exactly what its signer is worth. No code enforces one.
That is a human-in-the-loop pipeline, and it is the shape I would build for a studio: the model does the fan-out, a person owns the judgement, and nothing reaches a player until a human says yes.
The gap where paper sits is not an unfinished feature either. It is the only reason anything in the game is at stake.