You're the British Prime Minister. A commander with nine people under her believes Russia has begun preparing for war. The Joint Assessment Committee has downgraded her evidence. Nobody else believes her. You have twenty turns.
Play it in your browser: https://odinmedia.itch.io/transition-to-war
The design problem I couldn't get around, and which the whole thing ended up being built on: a game about deterrence can't have a safe setting on the dial. Visible mobilisation raises the probability the other side moves, because a state that's getting ready is one you attack before it finishes. Prepare too little and you invite it. Prepare too visibly and you cause it. There's no correct readiness level to find — only trades you make and then live with.
Two things that turned out to matter more than I expected:
Consent and confidence are separate, and they diverge. A Commons majority isn't the same as a country that will tolerate being held at readiness for seven months. Holding the country at readiness for months costs more than mobilising it fully for six weeks.
There's no score — there's a ledger. Every irreversible thing you do is shown to you once, at the moment you incur it, never as a running total. At the end it's read back in full, without comment. That replaced the score entirely, and it's the piece I'd keep if I only got to keep one.
[screenshot: mid-game document view with sidebar]
Everything arrives as paper — minutes, assessments, an annexe map, a readiness state you read rather than watch. Twenty turns, 110 choices, each with a written consequence rather than a branch label. Five endings, and a sixth condition where nothing resolves at all.
It exists because an earlier version ran inside a chat session and died at turn 10 when the context filled up, taking every hidden variable with it. Hidden state held by a language model isn't hidden — it drifts, you can talk it out of the model, and it evaporates when the session does. So the state moved into code: consent, visibility, readiness, institutional capacity and the adversary's own decision clock, all in a state object evaluated by fixed rules.
Free, browser-based, roughly 40 minutes. There's a download if you'd rather keep a copy — one folder of HTML that works offline.
