Games Like Governor

You run a central bank. One lever matters more than the rest - the nominal policy rate - and behind it sit forty-odd others that unlock only once history has invented them. The economy answers every move you make, one quarter late.

A real model, not a mood

Governor runs on the Carlin-Soskice three-equation model, the one macroeconomics is actually taught with:

The rate you set is nominal. The real rate falls out of the Fisher equation through expectations, and expectations depend on whether anyone believes you: the anchor drifts up while you hit the target and erodes when you miss. There is an effective lower bound. There is inflation bias if the bank is not independent. There is Okun's law, and a bank lending markup stacked on top of whatever you set.

Below that sits endogenous Solow growth with hysteresis, WS/PS microfoundations for equilibrium unemployment, public finance with a debt accumulation law and a sovereign risk premium, an open economy with a UIP exchange rate and a balance of payments, a Minsky financial cycle, and inequality tracked as Gini.

1925 to 2025

The century campaign runs 404 consecutive quarters, 118 scripted historical events and five forks where history could have gone the other way:

The 1929 crash, three waves of banking panics, the NIRA and the Wagner Act, a war economy with the Fed pegged to Treasury needs, Bretton Woods, the OPEC embargo, the Volcker disinflation, Black Monday, the S&L crisis, the Asian crisis, the dot-com bust, subprime, Lehman, the pandemic and the 2021-22 inflation - all of it arrives on schedule. The only open question is what you do about it.

Play the century whole, or take any one of its seven eras as a standalone scenario. Five tutorial missions and three dozen sandboxes come with it.

An economy you can look at

The state of the economy is drawn as a city on an isometric world map, and the drawing is not decoration. Building height and density track cumulative real GDP; street traffic tracks the output gap; the palette warms with inflation and cools in a slump; construction starts when potential is rising and money is cheap. You will see a crisis in the skyline before you open a chart.

Around it: a world map with era-accurate borders, up to 24 competing countries each running its own central bank, a gravity model of trade, tariffs and trade wars. An optional mode - off by default - turns on spheres of influence: era blocs, satellites, credit dependency and the client-state path.

If you would rather have numbers than pictures, there is a terminal: four tabs of tables and charts, a decomposition of every change in inflation and in the output gap by driver, and an influence map of 106 model variables and the 276 links between them.

The Association

Once a year the Economic Association convenes and takes your policy apart. Its chair grants one permanent bonus and one permanent penalty - a choice of school you will live with for the rest of your term.

Multiplayer

Two players or more, over LAN or through an internet relay. Each player gets a country and a full instance of the model; after every turn the world is stitched together from mirrors of the other economies, so your surplus is somebody else's deficit. Loans between players are a lever too.

Three languages

English, Russian and Simplified Chinese - full interface, including the in-game explanations of the model.

What is not here

No random numbers standing in for an economy, no intended solution, and no story to pull you out of a stagflation you caused. There is a model, a century of history, and your own loss function.