A box arrives each month. Inside it is a situation, two responses, and no more time than you are given.
All parties, politicians, departments, newspapers and events are fictional.
The country is recognisably somewhere. The office is furnished. The previous occupant left at short notice and the corridor has a space for your portrait.
Each in-game month a document is placed in the ministerial box. It describes a situation, notes what has already been attempted, and declines to recommend a course of action. Two responses are available. Both are wrong in different directions, and one of them will be selected for you if you do nothing.
Four groups are watching: the Cabinet, the backbenchers, the press and the public. Every response moves all four. Let any of them reach zero and you are removed by lunchtime. A run takes three to six minutes. It ends the way these things end.
This is the screen you will spend the game looking at. It is a briefing note that has lost control of events but not its grammar.
The reservoir opened this morning was opened once before, in April, by you, in a different county. Both sets of photographs are now held by the same regional title. The Department has offered to describe the earlier occasion as a rehearsal. The press office is awaiting instruction and has been awaiting it for some time.
Specimen only. Nothing here is real, including the reservoir.
Colleagues. Loyal to you personally, and to the arithmetic professionally, in that order until the order changes.
Two hundred members with nothing to lose, no department to run, and a great deal of time in which to reflect.
They do not require a story. They require a photograph and a sentence you did not intend to finish.
Slow to notice and slower to forgive. When they move, they have already finished deciding.
One crisis each in-game month. There is no pause and no adjournment.
Two responses, chosen against a visible timer. Not choosing is itself a choice, and the press record it as one.
Every response costs something. There are no free options anywhere in the game.
A faction at zero removes you. A faction at a hundred is not safety either — you can be destroyed by adoration.
Survive four years and face an election, presented as a returning officer's declaration.
A daily brief runs on the same seed for every player. One attempt. No second sitting.
When it ends, a successor inherits the file and your portrait joins the corridor.
Every run is kept: the portrait, the months served, and the group that finally withdrew. It is not a leaderboard. It is a wall.
No subscription. Nothing consumable. Play offline for as long as you last.
Free on Google Play. Android, portrait, three minutes at a time.
All parties, politicians, departments, newspapers and events are fictional.