nation building

my scout troop is working on a merit badge about government.

one of the requirements involves solving government problems in an imaginary scenario and as i was thinking about what activities to offer the girls, i realized that the requirement would be satisfied easily by playing nationstates.

and why reinvent the wheel?


nationstates even has an educational setting that will insulate your class group from the other players and do other things that make it suitable for group study with children but it turns out you need to be a legit school to get that kind of region set up for you on account of there are people out there who will call themselves schools just to gain political advantage.

ok, not how i was hoping that would turn out, but the nationstates moderator who splained it to me was very knowledgeable and nice.

so yesterday i went on a research bender looking for online government simulation games.

i found republic of you, which seems to be little more than a thinly disguised argument for democratic socialism, which i'm not against, but it has only fourteen issues to solve and there aren't really any consequences for your decisions. if you solve your poverty problem by simply giving everyone living wage ( a thing i support by the way) the only consequence you get is an angry text from a corporate CEO, which in no way illustrates how anything works. it will, however, tell you what percentage of other players thing that's awesome too, and that's kind of a no-brainer, because people who are interested in playing oxfam games have self-selected to look at things that way.

there's filteries, a wonky little simulator that more or less shows you alignments and costs. it has a pretty graphic, but exciting it isn't. fun for me to play with, but probably a snoozefest for kids.

cybernations is text rich and slow playing (nation simulators all tend to be slow) it's low on social policy content and high on resource management and empire building. it has the option to let you play it in peace mode, which lets you concentrate on building an economy rather than defending yourself from the other countries.


nations has a pretty graphic interface that i am finding difficult to learn but easy to use once you figure it out. it's less about policy than it is about resource management, and its quest chain requires you to use combat to succeed. i STILL can't figure out how to get more cows. i like that it has sports teams, but i REALLY don't like that all the terrorist groups have vaguely islamic sounding names. there's also no pacifist mode; if some other country wants to have a war with you, i don't think you have any protection from it, which is pretty realistic, i guess.

ars regendi seems to be the most realistic of the lot. you can really get into the weeds here with budgeting and policy and it has the interesting feature of assuming that your country WILL eventually fail. the trick is to make is as good as possible for as long as possible. it has the added benefit of letting you play two countries at once in the free version. it is also slow. there are a limited number of actions you can take per game day.

that's my list.