NationStates: Run a Country One Absurd Decision at a Time

NationStates gives you a country and then refuses to give you a manual. Instead it gives you problems. A lobbyist wants to privatize the fire department. A child has written in about the national animal. Someone has discovered a loophole in the tax code involving cheese. You pick an answer, and somewhere in the machinery your civil rights rating twitches.

Do that a few hundred times and you look up to find you are running a Corporate Police State and you honestly cannot point to the moment it happened.

What is NationStates?

It started in 2002 as marketing. Max Barry had written Jennifer Government, a satirical novel about a world run by corporations, and built a small web toy to promote it. The toy outlived the promotion by more than two decades and is still running, still free, and still looks like a website from the era that produced it.

The loop is simple enough to explain in a sentence. You found a nation, complete with name, motto, currency and national animal. Then issues start arriving: short news items describing some domestic crisis, each with a handful of possible responses. Every response is written in the voice of somebody with an agenda, a union boss, a general, a wellness influencer, a very confident nine-year-old. You choose one. Your statistics move.

What makes it work is that the writing is genuinely funny and genuinely mean. The options are never clean. The obviously humane choice tends to arrive bundled with something ruinous, and the sensible economic policy usually comes wrapped around a small atrocity. Many issues are written by players and reviewed by the site’s editors, which is why the collection covers everything from nuclear policy to competitive dog grooming.

Your choices feed a set of axes: economic freedom, civil rights, political freedom. Those produce a government classification, which is the game’s real scoreboard. They also feed the World Census, a long list of ranked statistics measuring things like average income, cheerfulness, rebellious youth and cheese export capacity.

Around all of this sits the part players stay for: politics. Nations live in regions, regions have message boards and elected delegates, and the World Assembly debates player-written resolutions that bind member states. There are alliances, coups, invasions carried out entirely through endorsement counts, and decades of accumulated grudges. It is a geopolitical soap opera that has been running since before most of its players were born.

What can you do with NationStates?

• Found a nation in about a minute. Name, motto, animal, currency, and a short questionnaire that sets your starting politics. No email verification maze.
• Answer issues. The core loop. A few arrive at a time, and each one nudges your statistics in directions you rarely predict.
• Watch your government classification mutate. From Inoffensive Centrist Democracy to something considerably less inoffensive, one reasonable-sounding decision at a time.
• Read your World Census rankings. Dozens of scales rank every nation, and landing in the global top ten for something ridiculous is a genuine thrill.
• Join a region. Regions have message boards, cultures, elections and long-simmering feuds. This is where the game becomes social.
• Participate in the World Assembly. Debate and vote on player-written international law, or campaign for delegate on behalf of your whole region.
• Write dispatches. Publish factbooks, national histories and propaganda that other players can actually read.
• Collect nation cards. A trading card side game where every nation is a card, with rarities, auctions and a market players take far too seriously.

Tips to get the most out of it

Read every option as propaganda, not information. Each response is written by somebody trying to sell you something. If an option sounds unusually reasonable, look again for the clause you skimmed.

Dismiss issues you do not care about. You are allowed to refuse. Doing nothing is a valid policy, and it prevents the drift that comes from answering everything just to clear the queue.

Pick a direction and commit. Nations that answer inconsistently end up as bland centrist mush. If you want a memorable classification, decide early whether you are building a libertarian tax haven or an authoritarian utopia and answer accordingly.

Find an active region early. The solo game is a pleasant few minutes a day. The regional game, with its politics and endorsement math, is the one people play for years. Browse a few boards before settling.

Use it as a worldbuilding engine. Plenty of players treat their nation as a writing project, filling out dispatches with invented history and using issues as prompts. The mechanics are perfectly happy to be scaffolding for fiction.

Log in more often than you think you need to. Nations that sit idle long enough get cleaned up. A quick daily visit is enough to keep a decade-old country alive.

If you like NationStates, also try…

• Universal Paperclips: another deceptively simple browser game where small rational decisions compound into something alarming.
• The Evolution of Trust: a playable explainer on cooperation and betrayal, which is more or less the World Assembly in miniature.
• SCP Foundation: a vast collaborative fiction project built, like NationStates, on thousands of player-written entries.
• Candy Box 2: proof that a text-heavy browser game with no graphics budget can eat an entire weekend.

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