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A strategy game about the AI race where you can't verify alignment

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I made a strategy game where you play the US or China through the AI race, 2026 to 2030, sixteen quarterly turns in the browser. One run takes about half an hour.At the start, the game seals two dice you never get to see. Inside: how hard alignment really is, and how fast takeoff compounds. You get eval reports, but only as ranges, and they flatter you most exactly when your systems are least aligned. At the end you get a debrief which shows what your evals said each quarter and also what was actually true. I lost every run I played myself so far.Every number in the game is source-backed or a labeled design choice. Some of them are wrong somewhere. There is an issue template for challenging a number with a better source, and the better source wins.No accounts, no tracking, no server, works offline after first load. AGPL, nonprofit. Cards and parameters are plain JSON. Contribution is possible without writing code. Would like to have your thoughts if it is fun to play, how you like it and what you would improve. Any feedback is welcome and most importantly, if we got something badly wrong.Code: https://github.com/chipmates/criticalwindow

HN · launched Jul 6, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 0 views

Niche: browser-based video games · 380 launches, 21 in the last 7 days ▼ -28% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes It is a turn-based browser simulation game with deterministic or probabilistic state updates, static data files, and standard UI components.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 471 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #363 of 472 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 250 days after the earliest competitor.

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