Playing a bad hand well
That may sound like a lot to wrap your head around for a game that is playable in 15 to 20 minutes, but it’s a surprisingly accessible experience for the most part. The game serves up plenty of explanations and news articles that you can click on to better understand the real-world context and in-game consequences.
However, each ship approved for transit tends to carry a greater cost or trade-off as the game progresses over 10 playable days between March 3 and April 13, 2026. You have the choice of not sending any ships through the strait on any given day, but that can quickly lead to dismal endgame results, like “empty shelves” and “desalination collapse” for Gulf States facing food insecurity and a lack of fresh water from energy-starved desalination plants.
If you manage to muddle through and keep all the factions from spiraling, the endgame results still provide plenty of charts and numbers to remind you that the real-life Strait of Hormuz crisis is far from over. Even squeezing through several dozen ships over 10 days—the best-case shipping scenario in the game—remains a far cry from the pre-war average of 130 ships passing through the strait each day. The inadequacy of that shipping rate continues to have daily real-world consequences.
Gornicki designed and built the game by himself over 17 days while executing the game’s underlying code with the help of an AI coding tool, which he described in a press kit as being “audited and corrected at every step.” He also incorporated more than 125 verified and linked news articles, along with shipping data from sources such as Windward Maritime Intelligence and Lloyd’s List.
“The chokepoint is not a story you read once and put down—it returns every week, in fuel prices, in fertilizer shortages, in food security in places far from any tanker,” Gornicki said. “I wanted to give people a form of this reporting they could not skim past.”
