Hi all, I built a political simulation game that uses AI reasoning models to let you run a country through arbitrary executive actions. Think of it as an "executive order simulator" inspired by games like Civilization and NationStates, but where you can take any action you want - even copying real executive orders into the game.

The game generates a unique country for you with detailed characteristics (culture, economy, crime rates, etc). Each turn, you face natural events like protests, sanctions, or disasters, and can respond with any policy decisions via free-form text. The AI then simulates complex ripple effects - for example, a policy promoting domestic oil might affect your CO2 emissions, international trade relations, and even traffic fatality rates.

Technical details: - Built with Next.js + FastAPI - Uses OpenAI's reasoning models (o1 and o1-mini) to handle simulation - Structured as a multi-agent system where o1 orchestrates key changes and o1-mini handles detailed updates - Everything including the country flags is AI generated

The source code is available at: https://github.com/sshh12/state-sandbox

I wrote up my learnings about working with reasoning models and the technical challenges in building this at: https://blog.sshh.io/p/socioeconomic-modeling-with-reasoning