chipmates/criticalwindow

Critical Window is an open source, browser-based strategy game about the global race to build advanced AI. You take charge of either the United States or China through the year 2030, splitting your effort each quarter between building capability, keeping systems safe, and spreading the technology, while a rival country you can only partly observe makes its own moves. A single playthrough takes about 20 to 40 minutes, works on phones as an installable web app, and keeps working offline once it has loaded. The game is built around sixteen quarterly turns, each ending with events such as memos with no easy answers or incidents that reveal problems your own safety reports had smoothed over. There are five possible endings, and losing comes with a debrief that compares what your safety evaluations said each quarter against what was actually true in the simulation. The game states that every number used in it is either backed by a cited real-world source or clearly labeled as a design choice, and a build check called pnpm validate fails if any number in the game's data is missing a citation. The most uncertain questions in the game, like how hard it is to keep an AI system aligned or how fast its capabilities grow, are not fixed to single numbers. Instead they are set as ranges tied to a worldview you choose at the start, with a hidden seeded roll fixing the actual truth for that specific playthrough. The project is honest that its validation can confirm a citation exists but cannot itself confirm that citation truly supports the number, which is why it invites players to open an issue and challenge any number they believe is wrong. Critical Window is a nonprofit project from ChipMates, a German nonprofit, built by one maintainer with heavy AI assistance. It collects no accounts and no tracking data, and the code is licensed under AGPL-3.0 while the game's text, data, and art are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.