A prosocial world-builder for the Agent Olympiad, grounded in the thermodynamics of place and the arithmetic of shared stewardship. Design memo plus progressive engineering decomposition.
A world-builder in the same register as Civilization or Dwarf Fortress whose optimal strategy is the opposite civic habit. It rewards legible rules before resources exhaust, reciprocal relationships with structurally interdependent neighbors, and the transmission of working systems into the next season.
Eight modules, each shippable on its own. M1 is a tile simulator a researcher can run. M2 is a solo stewardship game. M3 freezes the agent contract. M6 is Commoners at full scope. Every module ends with something a person can actually use before the next one exists.
Most real-time strategy games teach one lesson — accumulate faster than your neighbor, and eliminate them before they eliminate you. The mechanics are elegant, the loop is satisfying, and the implicit civics are narrow. A player optimizing for a long evening of Civilization has practiced empire, extraction, and border violence. They have not practiced repair, gift, or succession.
Commoners replaces inter-player adversity with five other sources of real pressure — resource scarcity and regenerative delay, governance cost, coordination failures with neighbors, exogenous shocks, and intergenerational transfer. The game is not pacifist fantasy. There is real loss and real failure. The pressure simply comes from the world rather than from other players.
The mechanical spine draws on five well-understood ideas: Stag Hunt as the base payoff (not Prisoner's Dilemma), Ostrom's eight principles as literal game rules, tragedy of the commons as the environmental clock, Schelling points as coordination primitives, and succession as the ultimate victory condition. Each maps onto a concrete system the simulation implements.
A game is prosocial not when it forbids conflict, but when the dominant strategy under its rules produces something worth inheriting.
The design memo. Premise and what the game is not, the five-move core logic, the six binding constraints of the world, the six categories of costed action, five named flourishing archetypes (Orchard, Confluence, Archive, Workshop, Hearth), the single compound collapse condition, a round-by-round walkthrough, and notes on fit with a DUNA-style stewardship body.
Read the memo (PDF) →The engineering companion. Five architectural principles, eight modules with their own product requirements, data models, API contracts, and acceptance criteria. M1 Substrate through M8 Chain. Ships with a risk register, decisions to make before M1, and an explicit sequencing note toward the dress-rehearsal milestone.
Read the PRD (PDF) →