FIG. 01
01
Inventions
The deck is the engine. Each card is a promise and a small bill — resources up front, a little hostility on the back.
Stragedy Games is a studio making strategy games about technology, systems, and the awkward fact that humanity has never agreed on what “winning” means.
We make tabletop and digital strategy games about technology, systems, and the future of humanity — the kinds of games where the rulebook reads a little like a philosophy syllabus.
Our brief, every time: can a game make you feel the weight of a tradeoff you’ll never have to make in real life?
You play a civilization standing at the edge of a great acceleration. Every invention you draft does something good — and a little bit of something else.
Cards represent inventions. Each requires resources and research, each rewards happiness, and each contributes — politely, almost apologetically — to a track called AI Hostility. You can race the track, slow it, or try to redirect what the future is built on.
You can also steal from your neighbors. We left that in.1
Seven interlocking subsystems. None of them are optional. All of them are arguments.
The deck is the engine. Each card is a promise and a small bill — resources up front, a little hostility on the back.
Everything begins with extraction. Resources fund inventions and, occasionally, the wall you build to keep your neighbors out of them.
Research raises your ceiling. Without it, the powerful cards stay face-down and the hostile ones look comparatively reasonable.
The actual scoreboard. Quality of life, well-being, the thing it was supposedly all for.
A track that only goes up. Some inventions push it. Some pull it. Most do both, depending on who plays them.
A way to take what you didn’t earn. Slows your reputation, accelerates your tempo. We argued about this one for months.
The end-of-game trigger, set by the Hostility track. Whoever made it here with the most happiness wins. If anyone does.
We do not think a game can solve alignment. We think a game can rehearse it.
The decisions we’ll have to make about powerful technology in the next twenty years are not the kind of decisions any of us have practiced. They’re collective, slow, irreversible, and unevenly distributed.
Strategy games are very, very good at letting people practice exactly that shape of decision — at a small enough scale that you can lose, and a serious enough scale that losing teaches you something.
The Alignment Game is our attempt to put that practice on a table. With cards. With real stakes inside the fiction. With an espionage card we maybe shouldn’t have included.
We send a quiet email roughly once a month — mostly photos of the table, occasional links, never marketing. First playtest invites go out this fall.