Mandate 2038
Sell the intelligence. Seize the grid. Authorize the future. A strategy game about six institutions turning cheap intelligence into infrastructure, authority, and competing claims to human continuity.
Start here
- Play the game Playable interface · Play against browser-native deterministic opponents; the local bridge is optional for Claude or Codex.
- First Game Guide Teaching interface · A fixed first-Era Default Play lesson using the canonical game components.
Required Default Game Play Kit
- Card Reference Required play-kit document · Printable canonical faces for every Default Game card type.
- Core Rules Required play-kit document · Complete setup, Eras, Actions, and scoring reference.
- Map Reference Required play-kit document · The 19-district jurisdiction, adjacency, movement, and location effects.
- Component Reference Required play-kit document · Every Default Game component, its purpose, and its setup location.
Learn the game
- World And Institutions Document · Setting, tone, Era fiction, and ending narratives.
Optional play
- Optional Tactics Document · An optional module for players who know the Default Play loop.
Development and evidence
- Simulation lab Simulation interface · Run local simulations from the deployed browser or load and replay saved reports.
- Advanced Play Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Balance And Exploitability Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Comparisons Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Complexity Reduction Protocol Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Components Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Defect Investigation And Closure Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Design Decisions Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Documentation reader Index · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Manufacturing And Publishing Study Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Playtesting And Evidence Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Rule Change Register Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Simulation And Player Strategies Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
- Thematic Content Bible Document · Design, testing, and implementation record.
Component review
- Component Inventory Physical specification · Default Game box contents and Advanced-only exclusions.
- Component Spec Physical specification · What every physical component is and how its state is made visible.
- Complete content gallery Gallery · All baseline and deferred cards with player-facing text and art direction.
- Baseline component gallery Gallery · Only components used by the controlled physical-test candidate.
The world of 2038
Intelligence became cheap enough to disappear into the price of ordinary software. Open weights ran locally; subscriptions collapsed; automated tutors, clinics, adaptive cybernetics, and prescribed microbiomes won real loyalty. Total compute demand rose anyway. Bankrupt companies sold complete data estates, household robots trained through remote operators, and young founders acquired the teams that had trained them. The convenience was real. So were the archives, cameras, service plans, and displaced expertise financing it.
Once software stopped being scarce, power did. Model companies acquired substations, water rights, reactors, transmission corridors, and municipal budgets. Engineered coral, fungal utilities, and algae reactors became infrastructure. Robots retired lethal shifts, then clogged roads, lifts, loading docks, and pipes by obeying incompatible local plans. Towns accepted jobs, emergency capacity, warm public pools, and upgraded grids, while hostile states kept fighting across a jointly owned bridge carrying desalinated water and coolant. Orbital collectors bypassed public utilities; compute blocs hardened borders; disposable simulated worlds received priority electricity because a wager made waste economically legible.
The contest moved from capability to authority and from authority to continuity. Courts accepted modeled intent, licensed-organ testimony, and pollinator corridors negotiated through machine-readable blooms; cognitive donors sold neural access; and an engineered bio-compute organism multiplied beyond one billion instances in a single growth cycle before plateauing into glyph-shaped colonies that civic systems read as testimony. Later, cities formed nervous systems from residents, roots, pipes, and machines; snapshots produced rival successors; a living watershed demanded standing and compensation; matter compilers inherited the bloom's authority to reproduce; and the dead remained employed. Institutions declared AGI when proof, debt, and legitimacy required a threshold. The question was no longer whether intelligence existed, but who could refuse its version of the future.