Diceocracy: UK

A career in the Commons, one roll at a time

Diceocracy™ is a single-player career game set in the House of Commons. You start as a candidate in a by-election for a real constituency. Win it and you have a seat, a diary, a whip to keep happy and a ladder that ends at Downing Street. Lose it and the party may put you up somewhere else in three weeks.

The diary fills with encounter cards: a surgery, a division, a word in the tea room, a reporter who has found something. Most choices carry a check. You pick up the d20, throw it across the table and add your score; the total has to reach the difficulty class printed on the card. The odds are shown before you commit, and the die lands where the physics puts it.

What a career holds

• A by-election to begin: four days of campaigning, then the count.
  
• A candidate whose face you build part by part, or shuffle, and can change later from the dossier.
  
• A diary of surgeries, divisions, meetings and set pieces. Some of them have to be dealt with before the week moves on.
  
• Popularity, morale and whip standing, each moved by what you choose and by who saw you choose it.
  
• The government ladder from backbencher to Prime Minister, or the opposition's to Leader of the Opposition.
  
• A tracked Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, filled on merit, reshuffled, and staffed by people who remember who sacked them.
  
• Scandal, betrayal and romance, any of which can end up on the front pages.
  
• General elections that run on the polls, with an election night to sit through.
  
• A world that ages with you. Colleagues retire, lose their seats and die, and the intake you arrived with grows old alongside you.

Real seats, invented people

The map is real: which party holds each of the 650 seats, and the constituency results the polling runs on. The people are not. Every Member is generated at the start of each career, with a name, a face, an age, a faction, causes and a backstory drawn from the party's archetypes, and the journalists, lobbyists and lovers are invented too. Offices start empty and are filled on merit. Nobody in the game is based on a real politician.

Mods and the parliament editor

A Mods folder beside the game overrides any content file, and the Mods screen lists, orders, imports and exports them. The parliament editor needs no files at all: pick a seat, change the Member's name, party, scores, biography or face, and share your edits as a zip. A mod cannot change the rules, touch a save or unlock an achievement.

The small print

21 Steam achievements. Single player. English (UK) only. Saves and settings stay on your device. The game keeps no account of its own and has no telemetry; the only thing it tells anyone is that you unlocked an achievement, and it tells Steam.

Every character in this game is fictional. The seats, the parties and the numbers behind them are real; the people holding them are not. Any resemblance to a real person, living or dead, is coincidence.