Every game on this site — eight years of a borough, eight years of a county, one World Cup — is sized to be finished in a single sitting. This is the most deliberate decision in the whole project, so it deserves its defence in writing.
Endings are where the meaning is
Management games traditionally never end — there’s always another season, and “one more turn” is the genre’s business model. But a story that never ends can’t mean anything, because meaning lives in the reckoning: the final table, the verdict, the sentence that says what your eight years amounted to. We’d rather you finish — actually finish, verdict and scorecard and all — and then choose to go again with a different place and a different plan, than drift out of an endless save around year fourteen. Completion beats abandonment.
Decisions need their consequences in reach
These games run on choices with delayed consequences — the dilemma you answered in Year 2 sends its invoice in Year 3. That structure only lands if you’re still there when the invoice arrives, with the original decision still in living memory. “Oh no — the car park deal” is the exact feeling these games are built to produce, and it needs the whole arc held in one head. Eight years is roughly the most future a person can hold in an evening. So that’s the size.