Explanation
What the game trains
You lead a country through six connected diplomatic meetings in a hypothetical scenario. The game trains three skills: predicting what other people and governments will actually do, choosing a complete and realistic instruction under pressure, and learning honestly from what happens next. It is practice for careful thinking, not a test you can memorise.
How a meeting works
Each meeting is one page. First you read the room: where you are, what has just happened, and what your ministers and other leaders say. They disagree on purpose; no one is simply right. In the margin you find the current situation, the evidence on the table and a briefing book about every country.
Below the conversation is your draft cabinet instruction. You fill it in from top to bottom and send it with Approve and send instruction. The other governments then act at the same time, and you read the outcome memorandum before opening the next briefing.
Forecasts and confidence
Before you choose, you predict what three governments will do and how one relationship will change, and you say how sure you are (35% to 90%). Being right matters, but so does being honest about your uncertainty. Each forecast gets a Brier score: 0 is perfect, and being very confident and wrong costs the most. Accuracy and calibration are shown separately so you can see whether your confidence matches your results.
Mandates: the instruction you approve
You approve one of five draft mandates. Each mandate is a full negotiating package: the exact words you will say, what you ask for, what you offer, what you will not accept, how compliance will be checked, who does what next, who supports and who resists it, the human cost and the main uncertainty. Open “Full terms of this mandate” to read everything before you decide. There is no perfect option and no joke option.
Expected consequence, warning sign and fallback
You also name the most likely second-order consequence, the evidence that would prove your plan wrong, and a prepared fallback: what the cabinet will do if that warning appears. If counterparts answer your mandate with pressure, the fallback is used and its effects are recorded. If not, it stays in reserve. Either way it is written into your record.
Outcomes, delayed effects and continuity
After each meeting the outcome memorandum tells you who acted and how, what changed for ordinary people, firms and institutions, which assumptions held or failed, and what plausible alternative could have happened. Some effects are delayed: trade deals, sanctions, aid and treaty checks can arrive one to three meetings later. The next meeting opens with “Since the last meeting”, built from what actually happened: your previous instruction, the responses, open commitments and your warning sign and fallback. People and governments remember.
Endings
A campaign ends after six meetings, or earlier if escalation, economic breakdown or coalition collapse makes diplomacy impossible. The closing assessment describes what agreement or failure now exists, who bears the cost, which commitments survived and what is still unresolved. Results are written in words, not scores. Possible endings range from a durable settlement to a fragile compromise, a managed standoff, isolation, collapse, breakdown or uncontrolled escalation. The same replay code with the same choices always produces the same result.
Difficulty
Analyst gives reliable intelligence, causal hints and a staff recommendation. Strategist gives less reliable reports and tighter budgets. Grandmaster gives sparse intelligence, slower consequences and counterparts that adapt to your pattern.
Real country names, fictional scenario: safety and limits
Country names are real and used only as orientation labels, so you can tell the sides apart at a glance. All officials, roles, geography, events, motives, behaviour, institutions and outcomes in a campaign are fictional, authored variables. They are not claims about those countries, and not forecasts of what their real governments would do. Military readiness and escalation exist only as abstract diplomatic pressure; there are no weapons, targeting or violent instructions. Motives and feelings are hypotheses inside an authored model, never knowledge of real minds, and the game does not predict real people or governments. Evidence is labelled by where it comes from: verified fact, official statement, private report, rumour or analyst hypothesis.
Where your progress is stored
Everything is stored only in this browser on this computer (local storage). Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is encrypted. Clearing the browser’s site data deletes it. To keep a backup or move to another browser, use export and import at the bottom of the Journal (Extensions → Journal).