The hardest work in these games isn’t the simulation — it’s the writing. Sixty-four boroughs and counties plus eighty nations, each needing to feel like itself to the people who live there, in a game that gently teases everyone. Some field notes on how that’s done.
A place is a character with a postcode
Every borough and county gets the same skeleton: a tagline, an introduction, what’s going for it, what’s working against it, a perk, and a set of local headlines that surface through the years. The craft is making each one specific. Westminster’s tagline is “the front of the postcard”; Camden has been “coasting since Britpop”; Barnet, “the quiet achiever,” holds a green-belt consultation that receives fourteen thousand responses and one drawing of a dragon. The test for every line: would someone from there read it, wince, and concede the point? Generic civic jokes are infinite and worthless. The dragon is Barnet’s.
The rule: tease the place, never the people
Comedy about places curdles fast if it punches at the residents. Our line is simple: institutions, pretensions and planning departments are fair game; the people who actually live somewhere are not. Kensington gets mocked for basements with second pools — not for anyone who calls it home. The unglamorous places get the most affection by design: proud pros lists, perks that reward the underdog climb, unique builds written as love letters. A game called Postcode Envy only works if every postcode is worth envying from some angle. So far, the only complaint the contact inbox has received about a place’s portrayal is that somebody’s borough deserved more jokes. Correct.
Mechanics as character
Personality that stays in the copy is decoration; it has to reach the systems. So every place’s perk is its character made mechanical — heritage boroughs pay more to build because everything is listed, including some of the pigeons; tourist magnets earn cash back on events; scrappy outer counties get levelling-up money for scrapping away in the bottom half. Each place also owns unique buildings nobody else can construct — a Museum of the Actually Affordable Flat; a 500-seat venue exclusively for panel discussions, which sells out nightly and resolves nothing. You don’t just read that a place is different. You budget around it.
What the soul meter is for
Under the league table, every borough and county carries a soul score, nudged by each choice that backs the locals or trades character for cash. It never touches your ranking — deliberately. It exists because these games flirt with a cynical idea (your home town as a number in a league) and needed a counterweight that asks the truer question: after eight years of your management, does the place still know its own name? Winning the league while the soul drains gets you a specific ending — great numbers, no memory — and it’s written as the tragedy it is. The meter is the games’ conscience, and the only stat we’d never let you buy back.
All sixty-four places are browsable — every borough, every county, every nation. Find yours; see if we got it right; the complaints desk is open and genuinely enjoys the letters.