Third-World Dictator

The player is the dictator of a small third-world nation; his goal is to survive for twenty years. The key structural element of the game is the ministry, a primary governmental department. Each ministry is headed by a minister, has a budget that the player sets each year, is broken down into departments headed by deputy ministers, operates under the player's directives, and yields results that can be readily examined. There are eleven ministries, ranging from Defense and Education to Trade and Transportation.

The game is played in one-year turns. At the beginning of each year the player receives a budgetary report from the Ministry of the Treasury, specifying total revenues available for the year and last year's budget values. The player then adjusts these budget values. The player also sets policy by means of directives to each ministry. For example, the directive to the Ministry of Internal Security might give the player seven different levels of repression for dealing with dissent, ranging from "ignore them" and "monitor their activities" to "make some of them disappear."

The politics of the game revolves around factions. Each minister belongs to a faction; that minister will use the ministry to further the interests of his or her faction. If a minister becomes too ambitious, the player might decide to replace that minister with a less threatening one. Of course, sometimes the most loyal ministers are not too competent, and their ministries will then perform poorly, raising the level of popular discontent.

Thus, the player must juggle the ministries to ensure that his ministers are loyal and his enemies are impotent, to keep the people reasonably happy, to deal with those who aren't, and to keep the military from staging a coup. All in all, the game offers a host of challenges.