Europe · 1836 · North America · 1783
You take a throne and speak to your cabinet in plain language. They translate, the state acts, and a historian writes up the year — then rewrites it when later events change what it meant.
An alternate-history grand strategy game refereed by a deterministic engine. The machine narrates. It never invents a number.
What makes it different
Your own government lies to you
You never see the world. You see what your ministers report. A treasurer who is skimming overstates the treasury; a war minister who wants a war overstates the army; an interior minister understates unrest. The distortion is deterministic, so the lie is consistent across turns rather than flickering noise — and it shrinks as your intelligence service improves. Auditing a man reveals his true figures and costs you his loyalty.
The history book rewrites itself
A chapter is composed at the close of every year. As the game runs on, the engine derives causal links between new events and old ones — a levy that preceded a declaration of war, a province ceded at one peace and demanded back at the next. When a link reaches into an earlier chapter, that chapter is rewritten with hindsight, and the superseded draft is kept. You can read what your historian believed in 1838 beside what they believe in 1844.
Two governments, two irreconcilable histories
Any rival power will write its own account of the same years — composed only from what that court actually observed. Vienna's historian cannot cite a British cabinet decision it never saw. Where the two books disagree, they disagree because the two governments knew different things.
The map is not wallpaper
Provinces are drawn over real city coordinates and clipped to a traced coastline; sea zones are drawn over the inverse of it. Armies march along adjacency and starve out of supply. A fleet from Portsmouth to Naples must round Iberia and pass Gibraltar. Shut the Sound and the entire Baltic is cut off — which is what gives Denmark, with two provinces and no army, its whole strategic point. Cross to 1783 and the same machinery makes a Spanish governor at New Orleans the man who decides whether Kentucky can sell its crop.
1848 arrives as a bill
Revolutionary pressure accumulates out of things the engine already tracks — unrest, spent legitimacy, war weariness, taxation past what a country bears — multiplied by how flammable the decade is. What happens when it crests is not a die roll. A crown with standing left buys calm by conceding a constitution; a hollow one is swept away. Revolutions spread along borders, because 1848 spread by example.
Any turn can be forked
A save is a seed, a nation and an ordered list of orders; the world is replayed from it rather than stored. So branching the timeline at any past turn is free, and the counterfactual is a thing you can actually open — two histories of the same country, diverging from the day you changed your mind.
A quarter, as it arrives
“Hang the treasury minister and put a commoner in his place. Then move the northern army to the coast and wait.”
— the ruler, addressing the cabinet
The chancellery records the removal of Mr Ashcombe on a charge of peculation. His successor is a Bristol grain factor of no family, whose appointment the court has received coldly and the country has not.
The Treasury declines the march: the northern army stands at Newcastle and cannot reach the coast in one quarter.
— the quarter, as resolved
Every refusal states its reason, and the reason is arithmetic. The engine checks each order against real state before anything touches the world, so no amount of persuasive phrasing produces a treasury you do not have.