Briefing note for teachers
OpenDoctrines in the classroom
Pupils run a country — its budget, its industry, its politics and its neighbours — and watch what their decisions cost. It opens in a browser tab, installs nothing, and asks for no account.
- Cost
- Free. No purchase, no licence, no subscription, nothing to buy inside it. The source is public.
- Installation
- None. It runs in the browser you already have — nothing for IT to approve, package or deploy.
- Pupil data
- No account is required to play. Single-player asks for no name, no email and no sign-in, so there is no pupil data to assess, store or delete. An account exists only for online multiplayer, which a lesson does not need.
- Language
- The interface is translated into 21 languages, including Arabic, Czech, German, Hindi, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu.
What it actually teaches
The game is a working model of a state under constraint, and nearly every lesson in it comes from that constraint rather than from any text on screen.
- Scarcity is the whole game. Research, industry, the army and social policy come out of one budget. Pupils cannot have all four, and the argument about which to cut is the lesson.
- Geography limits industry. Each province states the industrial level it can support, set by its population, how densely that population lives, its land area and its mineral wealth — a more honest account of industrialisation than most textbooks manage.
- Decisions take time. Every policy carries an implementation period. A pupil who changes course every turn achieves nothing, and finds that out without being told.
- Repression is priced. Ethnic policy, unrest and rebellion are modelled, and a government that rules by force pays for it in money and in territory it stops controlling.
- Alliances drag you in. Guarantees pull third parties into wars they did not choose — the mechanism behind 1914, demonstrated rather than described.
The political compass, with its real contents
Pupils govern by choosing from 46 policies on two axes. Each has a running cost, a delay before it takes effect, and a permanent shift in where the country sits. These are the actual policy names:
Before you show it to a class
Read this part rather than discovering it.
This is a game about the twentieth century and it does not look away from it. Pupils can impose press censorship, run a secret police, smear the opposition and repress an ethnic minority. The historical scenarios include 1914, 1939 and 1945, and any country in them can be played.
Handled deliberately, that is the strongest thing the game offers: a system where repression has a running cost and visibly loses you territory teaches more than a slide saying repression is wrong. Handled by accident, it is a conversation with a parent. The difference is whether you framed it first — so plan the discussion that follows the lesson before you plan the lesson.
There is no depicted violence. War is province colours changing and troop numbers falling; no images of casualties, no combat animation.
Practical notes, honestly
- A full scenario does not fit a lesson. The world map is 1641 provinces and a campaign runs for hours. For a single period, use the tutorial or build a small scenario in the editor.
- There is a tutorial, with a map built for it and an advisor who talks a new player through a first game. It is young: it has not been tested on a room of pupils, and you would be among the first.
- You can build your own map. The editor draws land and sea, cuts provinces, and places countries, populations and resources — so a scenario can match a syllabus rather than the syllabus being bent to the game.
- The numbers are real. The modern scenario takes populations from World Bank totals and deposits from USGS surveys, which is what lets you tell a class the figures are not invented.
- It is an alpha. Playable and unfinished, made by one developer. Expect rough edges and treat that as part of the honesty of using it.
Trying it takes five minutes
No sign-up, no download, no commitment. Open it, start the tutorial, or take three turns of 1939.
If you use it in a lesson, the developer would genuinely like to hear how it went — that feedback is scarce and it shapes what gets built next. Discord or the issue tracker.