A single-player decision game in the world of Mare Non Nostrum, inspired by NationStates.
You are the Carthaginian Council of Elders. One turn per year, from 125 BC to 105 BC — a prosperous commercial empire, quietly rotting underneath. Each year a dispatch or petition arrives: a tariff dispute, a colonial complaint, a temple that has claimed ownership of the harbour gulls. You choose one of four responses. The fourth is always a committee.
Consequences accumulate, and everything you learn of them arrives as in-world documents — port registers, commercial correspondence, underwriters’ clauses, academy returns. Committees report back years late. Standing facts pile up. Now and then a disaster of yours enters the language as an idiom, minted to the same standard as the book’s. And a running chronicle of your reign is kept by a contemporary historian — confident, mildly contemptuous of the Council, and reliably wrong about which events will matter.
After twenty years the whole record is bound into a book and judged by a historian writing generations later — who can see your policies, but not your dice.
The register is deadpan comedy delivered through period paperwork. The paperwork never notices it is being funny.
Year three of twenty, from a real run. The petition arrives; the Council resolves; the record replies.
From the office of the comptroller of public expenditure, Carthage, to the Council of Elders, greetings.
Honoured elders. The annual audit of the ceremonial stables records thirteen elephants. The establishment provides for twelve. The keepers, questioned separately, agree that the thirteenth has been present since the spring, is of good temper, and answers to commands in Punic; on the question of its arrival the accounts diverge, some holding that it came in the night, others that it came gradually. No owner has presented himself. No theft of an elephant appears anywhere in the Republic’s correspondence, and an elephant, the keepers submit, is not a thing that goes unmissed. Feed is drawn for twelve and divided thirteen ways, and the twelve elephants of the establishment have noticed. I request that the Council furnish an owner, an establishment of thirteen, or instruction as to which elephant is the extra one.
The Council will resolve:
The “Caralis principle” in the second option is the Council’s own ruling from the first year of this run — that a dead whale, arriving in harbour under its own way, is a vessel, and chargeable as an unlicensed entry. By year three it is precedent.
The Council chose the third. From the bound record:
In the third year the Council, finding thirteen elephants where twelve were provided for, resolved to sell one, the keepers to choose. The keepers chose. The correspondence that followed is preserved at Carthage.
From Massiva, steward of the lord Gauda of the Massylii, to the Council of Elders at Carthage.
Honoured elders. In the spring of last year my master’s caravan, returning from the coast, lost an elephant in the hills south of the city — a beast of eleven years, of good temper, answering to commands in Punic, my master’s herds being schooled in that tongue for the convenience of trade. We traced it, in season, to your ceremonial stables, where it appears it was fed, audited, and sold. My master does not dispute the sale; he has seen the auction record, and the price was fair. He observes only that the elephant was his. He asks its return, or its worth. And he asks the Council to reflect that he has sold Carthage his horses these thirty years, and never once counted them afterward.
Annotation in the comptroller’s hand: the worth paid, from the stables’ feed line. The establishment stands at twelve. The audit is closed.
The game runs as a skill in Claude Code or Codex. It keeps its state in local files and rolls real dice via the shell, which is why it needs a coding agent rather than a plain chat window.
A full game is twenty turns. You can stop at any point and resume later — the game lives in files, not in the conversation, so it survives across sessions.
The model reads the reference material and opens the first year.
Don’t peek at the run’s ledger.md or turn-log.md during play — they contain the odds, the rolls, and the queued consequences. After the final verdict, ask to see the turn-log if you want to look behind the curtain.
A note on spoilers.
The game’s reference/ folder contains excerpts of real content from the book. Only the model needs to read them. If you plan to read Mare Non Nostrum unspoiled, don’t browse that folder.