Gulf of Trump.

How to play

1. 1
   Pick a date and a country

   Eight turning points – 1914, 1939, 1950, 1964, 1991, 1999, 2014, 2022. Any country on the map, and in 1991 even the Soviet and Yugoslav republics that have no land of their own yet; in 1964 the Viet Cong, in 1999 the Kosovo Liberation Army.

2. 2
   Give orders

   Write what your government does this turn in plain language, or take moves from the panels – the cabinet, politics, the economy, foreign policy. Up to twelve orders. They are intentions, not guarantees.

3. 3
   End the turn

   Choose how long a turn lasts – a week to a year. The game master decides how far each order gets and how the world answers, and a report tells you what happened.

4. 4
   Talk to the world

   Write to any government, sit in a session of the UN and speak there yourself, ask your ministers. What you agree on counts when the turn ends.

5. 5
   Read the map

   Colour shows who holds a province; hatching marks occupation. Where a war runs through a province, each side's colour covers the towns it holds and the red line is the front. Arrows show the last turn.

6. 6
   Your country, your plan

   There are no goals and no victory screen: what to build, whom to fight and how to rule is yours to decide. Lose your land and you govern from exile; overthrown, you play on as the new government.

What is in the game

• A map at war

  About 2,700 provinces with terrain, people, resources and railways, and cities by size. Fronts run through provinces between the towns each side holds and move every turn; land taken stays with its captor until a peace. Six map modes, and a diplomatic view that colours the world by its side towards any country you pick.

• An army counted piece by piece

  Rifles, artillery, tanks, aircraft, ships, air defence and drones, each with its technology level, built from the army budget and lost in battle. Soldiers by training – career, trained conscripts, recruits; offensives, plans and losses; enemy divisions only as far as your intelligence sees them.

• An economy that keeps its books

  GDP, budget, debt, reserves, inflation and jobs for every country, in money of the day. Resources against need with stocks in months, trade cut by blockade and sanctions, deals for grain, oil, gas, metals or arms, and crises when the books go wrong.

• Science against history

  Seven directions of research – the army, industry, the land, medicine, science itself, communications and the strategic one with rockets and the bomb. Each breakthrough comes ahead of history or behind it, depending on what you put in.

• A government of people

  Eight ministries led by the real ministers of the day, painted in oil, each with a character, a competence and a loyalty of their own. Ask them, give them directives, plan special operations with them; asked, they draft orders, a budget or a research split for you to apply or not – and they can take offence and resign.

• Politics at home

  Parties and a parliament seat by seat with sittings and speeches, elections where the regime holds them, laws that need votes, protests, strikes and plotters you can talk to, the tension of the street – and coups.

• A world that answers

  Letters to any government with the talks kept, wars, pacts and organisations, summits and sessions of the UN you sit in and speak at with your advisers beside you. Other countries pursue aims of their own whether you write to them or not.

• A turn and its report

  A week to a year a turn, up to twelve orders. The story of the period comes first and the world's news follows; every turn stays in the chronicle, any of them can be shared as a picture, and the whole game replayed as a timelapse. Reports read aloud, orders dictated, and while the turn is written, 512 quotes and the author's tips.

• Your games

  Saves stay on your computer and, if you sign in, in the cloud. Name them, copy them, and download them as sealed files that open only as they were written. On Windows, from the Microsoft Store or the installer.

Portraits

The leaders and ministers, and the writers and thinkers quoted while a turn is written, are painted in oil from pictures that are free to use: public domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, the open licences of the British, Indian and Korean governments and of the European Parliament, the Free Art License, or with no known copyright restrictions, from Wikimedia Commons. A portrait keeps its photograph's licence, apart from the game's AGPL-3.0 code. People with no free photograph, and anyone new, get a shadow.

Pictures of the dates

The twelve dates on the front page are painted in oil from free pictures of their moment on Wikimedia Commons: public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA. Each keeps its picture's licence, apart from the game's AGPL-3.0 code.

Quotes

The quotes shown while a turn is written – the game's statesmen beside writers, thinkers and sages of every age – each have a source and a date. Most come from the sourced lines of Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0), translated into Russian, Ukrainian and English; its pages are listed here.

Voices

The game's own voice and speech recognition run on your computer, on open models:

• Piper · ukrainian_tts (medium) · MIT; data CC0
• UtrobinTTS · tts_ru_free_hf_vits_low_multispeaker · Apache-2.0
• Whisper base · onnx-community/whisper-base · MIT