I played the new game that makes you prime minister – this is what it taught me

Letting you step into the shoes of a fictitious PM, the game was designed by solo developer Benjamin Brewis and has been riding high in the app store downloads chart over the summer. It tasks you with trying to cling to power as long as possible. 

So, as someone who’s previously worked both as a lobbyist and as a civil servant (let’s gloss over exactly how good I was at either job), I thought I would be perfectly placed to translate this experience into a multi-term Downing Street stint; how hard can it be?

The game mechanics are simple – you’re installed in No 10, and with each month of in-game time that passes, you’re presented with a political scenario to respond to from a menu of options. Whatever you choose will affect your standing with one of four core stakeholder groups (see how easy it is to slip into the lingo?) – the Cabinet, the backbenchers, the media and the public. Once your approval rating with any of these factions drops to zero, you’re out on your ear – but that was obviously never going to happen to me. 

Suggested Reading

There can be no doubting it now – Google is dead

Matt Muir

The game eases me in, asking me to choose my chancellor, deputy PM and foreign secretary; I astutely navigate the concerns of the markets and the left- and right-wing factions of my party and seem to make everyone happy. This governing lark is a piece of piss! 

Over my first year, I deftly manage rows about inheritance tax, my first u-turn (“it’s not a u-turn, it’s a recalibration”), a ‘comedy’ incident with a dog in the House of Lords and the threat of a stalking horse challenge from “a northern mayor” (the game helpfully notes that “northern mayors are very difficult to win against as PM” – take a moment to imagine sad-faced Keir Starmer glumly playing this in his North London pad, nodding melancholically in agreement). 

The vibes are good! Everyone loves me! I swerve controversies about the Environment Agency and its funding, whether to nationalise the UK’s steel industry, and national riots in the wake of a death in police custody, alongside a minor PR gaffe featuring an anti-knife crime campaign whose mascot is “a sad-faced knife” (there’s a…degree of tonal whiplash inherent in the random nature of the events you’re faced with; on reflection, this is probably quite accurate too). 

After two years and three months in office, the Cabinet, the backbenches and the general public adore me. Only the media, for reasons I can’t quite understand, hate my guts. I begin to understand that the media are, at heart, dicks.

The next 18 months pass by in a blur of donations scandals, dodgy peerages, traitorous SPADs and an embarrassing moment when I fall asleep discussing international policy with the Norwegian PM. I am, it’s fair to say, not exactly thinking too deeply about my choices here, and I am not pursuing a coherent policy agenda so much as telling everyone what I think they want to hear…but it seems to be working! Maybe Boris Johnson was right after all?

And then, of course, it all falls apart. A series of serious-sounding issues pile up one after the other – honestly, how is it MY fault if we’re going to miss the 2030 Net Zero targets? SO unreasonable!

Finally, just shy of a general election that I was quietly confident about winning with a public approval rating of 87%, I am cruelly knifed in the back by my backbenchers, who by this point absolutely despise me. Four years into the job and that’s me out on the street – the game gives me a ‘distinguished’ rating, but I know I could have done more.

So back in I go, with a view to being more coherent, more ideologically consistent, more thoughtful. My second PM’s new, intellectually rigorous approach sees her once again seen off by the backbenchers, but this time after just 20 months. 

My third go ends ignominiously at the hands of my Cabinet, who rebel after 30 months despite both the public and the media rating me at 100%. This is bullshit, I decide, resolving that the country doesn’t deserve my unique skills and brilliance. 

Suggested Reading

I can’t help noticing that you seem to be wearing pervert glasses

Matt Muir

Is the game any good? On balance, not really. 

The political vignettes are drawn from reality – there are allusions to Boris Johnson hiding in a fridge here, Gavin Williamson’s pet tarantula, Cronus, there – and the policy dilemmas are certainly timely; my last PM was confronted with questions about school non-attendance post-pandemic, the government running out of AI tokens to power its morning briefings and a looming food supply chain crisis. 

There aren’t, though, quite enough of them, and you’ll find yourself seeing the same ones again and again after a few plays. The writing is competent enough, but a touch generic, and while interviews with the dev speak of them being “hand-written”, I confess to scenting the faintest whiff of Claude about the copy. 

At heart, the game mechanics are simple and simplistic – anyone wanting a real, knotty, complex simulation of what it means to wield political power would be better served checking out the vastly more sophisticated Suzerain instead. 

What No 10: Full Confidence does do, though, is give a feel for the relentless, bludgeoning conveyor belt of issues served up to the person in charge, and the degree to which everything gets both exaggerated and flattened by that relentlessness. Every crisis is vital when it’s on your desk, whether about GCHQ’s experimental parakeet army (this is a genuine in-game scenario) or privatisation, and after a while the volume and inevitability of their arrival start to grind the player down.

What’s that? Another massive, important issue that could sink my premiership? Christ, fine, whatever, onto the next one. 

After spending a grand total of 15 years in power across eight separate PMs, I can safely conclude that I never, ever want to do it again, even virtually. Still, I managed a personal best of four years, so in your faces Starmer, Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May, Brown, Callaghan and a few other losers whose names escape me – I AM BEST.