About the Game
A real model, not a game-shaped imitation
Governor runs your economy on the Carlin–Soskice three-equation model — the one macroeconomics is taught from in upper-year university courses.
IS — Demand. The dearer money is, the less a country spends and invests — but with a lag. Add to that the exchange rate, the government's budget, and how freely banks are allowed to lend.
PC — Inflation and unemployment. An overheated economy pushes prices up faster than a slump pulls them back down. And down is the hard direction: wages are almost never cut.
MR — The monetary policy rule. The game derives the best rate not from a curve, but from what costs you more — missing the inflation target, or unemployment you didn't have to have.
You set the nominal rate. The real price of money is what's left once expected inflation is taken out — and what people and markets expect depends on how far they trust you. Hit the target and credibility accumulates; miss it several quarters running and it crumbles, and the very same rate starts working noticeably weaker. The rate has a floor. If the central bank answers to the government, inflation drifts upward on its own: markets price in the abuse before it happens. Unemployment is tied to output, and banks add their own markup on top of your rate — borrowers pay more than you announced.
Out of your decisions a long-run picture assembles itself: economic growth (Solow), equilibrium unemployment, inequality (Gini), public debt, the exchange rate and the trade balance — and financial bubbles that inflate and burst if nobody is watching them.
The United States, 1925 to 2025
1931, the golden fetters — hold the gold standard, or let the currency go so the economy can breathe.
1971, Camp David — close the gold window, or defend Bretton Woods with reserves.
1979, Volcker — crush inflation with the rate, or take the road of price controls.
2008, the Lehman weekend — put a shoulder under the banking system, or let it fall.
2021, "is inflation transitory?" — wait the price spike out, or hit it early.
The 1929 crash, three waves of bank panics, a war in which the Fed holds rates wherever the Treasury needs them, Bretton Woods, the OPEC embargo, the Volcker disinflation, Black Monday, the Asian crisis, the dot-com bust, 2008, the pandemic and the inflation of 2021–2022 — all of it arrives on schedule. Only one question stays open: what will you do about it?
A full tutorial and a short one, to get the basic economic concepts and the links between them.
An economy you can look at
The state of the economy is drawn as a city on the world map. Buildings rise and multiply as the country grows richer; traffic in the streets shows how hard the economy is running; the city's colours warm up in an overheat and go cold in a slump; cranes work when money is cheap and the future looks good. You will see a crisis in the skyline before you open a chart.
Around it — a world map with historical borders by era and up to 24 rival countries, each with a central bank of its own. They trade with you the more willingly the closer and richer you are; tariffs and trade wars tear those ties apart. A separate mode, off by default, switches on spheres of influence: blocs, satellites, and debt dependency between countries.
If you would rather have numbers than pictures, there is the terminal: tables, charts, and a breakdown of every move in inflation — by cause, with figures. Plus the influence map: 106 variables of the model and 276 links between them, all on one screen.
The Association
Gather famous economists into an association of your own.
Once a year the Economic Association meets and takes your policy apart. You appoint the Chair — and with them a school of thought: it grants your economy one permanent bonus and one permanent penalty.
Multiplayer
From two players — over Steam or a local network. Each has their own country and a full copy of the model; after every turn the worlds are reconciled, so your surplus is somebody else's deficit. Credit to a neighbour is a lever too, and debtors know it.
What isn't here
No toy models, no random numbers standing in for an economy, no "correct" playthrough, and no story that will pull you out of a stagflation you arranged yourself. There is a model, a hundred years of history, and the price of a mistake you set for yourself.
Screenshots
17 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
The curves now match the model
The main fix of this update. The Phillips curve was drawn as a STRAIGHT LINE, while the engine bends it on both sides — and both nonlinearities are active in an ordinary game, not in some special mode:
- upward — the convexity of tight capacity: 4 pp of overheating DOUBLES the slope;
- downward — downward wage rigidity (DNWR): inflation does not fall linearly but is squeezed asymptotically, because nominal wages do not go down.
Measured slope across the range: 1.50 at +4 pp of overheating against 0.14 in deep deflation — a tenfold difference. A straight line with a constant slope was lying in exactly the places you look at a Phillips curve for.
It turned out this picture existed twice in the game: the main-screen diagram and the "Statics" cells (also used for scenario previews and the map overlay) were computed from separately written formulas. Both now share one source, and any drift from the engine is caught by a test.
An audit of all twelve textbook diagrams
Since one picture lied, we checked every one. Five disagreed with the model:
- The Beveridge curve — its own formula instead of the engine's matching function. At the rest point it showed 0.68% vacancies where the engine gives 2.79% — four times off.
- The Lorenz curve — a smooth arc instead of the three-tier polyline. The Gini coefficient matched, but the hollowing of the middle — the very thing the decomposition exists for — was invisible.
- Debt dynamics Δb × b — a straight line instead of a kinked one. It hid the main point: past the sovereign-premium threshold the interest rate rises TOGETHER with debt, and a second equilibrium appears — the one past which debt cannot be brought back. The threshold is now drawn and both points marked.
- Solow and the growth map — capital depreciation was left over from an old calibration and showed a steady-state capital stock half the engine's.
The formulas printed under the diagrams were rewritten too: they contradicted their own pictures.
Saving finished games
From a player report. A finished game could not be saved — and this turned out to be four bugs, not one:
- the results screen had no save button;
- Esc did not open the pause menu once the game had ended, and the pause menu is the only door to the save slots;
- switching language or window mode did not autosave a finished game: a completed century was lost silently;
- and if you did get such a save, it opened onto a frozen board with no explanation.
The button now sits on the results screen, pause works after the game ends, the autosave fires before a reload, and a loaded finished game opens with its results screen.
UI scaling
Requested on the forum: everything was too small on 4K. Ctrl + and Ctrl − change the scale on the fly, Ctrl 0 returns to 100%, and the same control is in the settings. Everything scales together — fonts, the map, charts and diagrams — because this is zoom, not font size.
The PC·MR diagram on the main screen
The third overview chart at the bottom right now shows PC·MR: your economy as a POINT on gap × inflation axes, with a trail of where it came from. The small "▼" in the corner switches the window to IS, WS-PS, the debt phase diagram, or the old country ranking — which has not gone anywhere.
The brief tutorial
Reworked so that the player makes real decisions:
- the game starts with inflation above target, so raising the rate is now NECESSARY rather than "press this because we asked". Previously the lesson started in equilibrium, and the player's very first action damaged a healthy economy;
- a second exercise was added: cut the rate so the dot lands on the MR line instead of punching through it;
- and it explains what all of it is for: you aim at MR, but you cannot land there in one quarter — the rate works with a lag, so the job is to shrink the distance to the line turn after turn.
Spheres of influence
From a player report: a small country was vassalizing a large one. Debt bondage did not check sizes at all, and its threshold was tied to quarterly GDP. The threshold now depends on the size ratio and is expressed in annual GDP: bonding an economy larger than yours is still possible, but it has become an event rather than a routine. Measured over three centuries: cases of "creditor smaller than victim" went from 1 to 0.
"Statics"
Labels on the diagrams no longer collide — they are placed by a layout pass that knows what has already been drawn. Curves leaving the frame now break off instead of running along the edge: that used to read as "the model flattens out here" while meaning the exact opposite.
Demo
- task cards removed;
- the starting country can only be one of the four the demo actually simulates — previously you could pick a country that does not exist in the game world.
Smaller things
- the formulas in the detailed tutorial are typeset the same way as in "Calculations";
- each campaign chapter now has its own grading bar instead of a shared era-wide one;
- achievements are awarded only with task cards enabled ("Medium" or higher).
Current Release
Build 25065512
Uploaded Sep 04, 2026
System Requirements
How to Install
Governor.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
Needed when extracting (WinRAR / 7-Zip) — not a site login.
E0BF2970
ad53527280145dfca590f09a53733053d3c750061d0ca12fd5aafc69aa30e9ba
You May Also Like
View All
Download Governor for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of Governor for free. Governor is a Indie released by Daniling.