Status: v1.0-rc1 — first release candidate (2026-09-22). Verified: 626/626 tests (working tree + fresh clone), RC1 soak 3/3 (money exact across 6,000 seed-ticks, zero deaths), live AI-seat session + byte-identical replay, every player-guide affordance engine-verified.
A deterministic economic engine that proves an entire political economy runs — then lets you play it, break it, and watch it survive.
OpenBoard implements Open Board Market Socialism: a transparent, append-only ledger economy of worker cooperatives, calorie-true needs, auction markets, surplus dividends, and a real voting republic. Every claim about stability is proven by bot-driven simulation before humans or AI actors ever touch it.
The thesis: economics as a protocol, not an argument. Rules are code, transfers are integer-exact, the ledger hash-chains every event, and any world can be replayed byte-identically from its transaction log.
| You play as | You can do |
|---|---|
| 🧑🌾 A citizen | Work a coop, earn wages, buy your basket, receive dividends, found coops, hold land under society's collective ownership (Georgist leasehold), pay/receive the land-value tax |
| 🗳️ A voter | One splitable, delegable, revocable vote token per month; vote on any proposal; run for trust; report violations for whistleblower rewards |
| 🎯 An adversary | Break the System mode: hoard, corner markets, free-ride, wage-mint, dump land — the engine scores your damage and the oversight system hunts you |
| 🤖 An AI seat | Mercury-2.5 plays politician and adversary live through the same public action API humans use — reasoning streamed, decisions recorded as ledger inputs |
| Milestone | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Core engine — hash-chained ledger, coops, kcal-true needs, recipes, auction markets | ✅ 540/540 tests, exact money conservation |
| Hardcore survival gate (unequal 50/50 start, 21M fixed supply, 2,000 ticks) | ✅ 3/3 seeds pass, worst essential streak 4/50 |
| City scale — 975 citizens with every founder default ON | ✅ RC1 soak 3/3: 6,000 seed-ticks, zero invariant breaks, 56,550 votes, 970 audits per seed, Gini ~180 |
| Performance | ✅ ~18 ticks/s @ 966 citizens (floor was 5) |
| Multiplayer seats | ✅ 12 seats × 1,000 ticks, 100% action throughput |
| LLM living world | ✅ Politician seat: 4/4 proposals passed live; adversary survived 200 ticks without breaking the economy; $0.00/session; byte-identical replay at zero model cost |
| Policy science | ✅ ~200+ banked study runs: tax/dividend atlas, society studies, disaster/spoilage/machine-wear/crisis batteries, P2 battery re-run under current engine |
| Cardano anchoring | ⏸ deferred by design until post-RC1 |
The one-sentence proof: a transparent cooperative economy with capacity-true production absorbed a 50%/tick confiscatory wealth tax, harsh disasters, adversarial hoarders, and proposal spam — zero deaths, exact money conservation, and every genuine failure traced to a bug, never a design flaw.
python -m venv venv && . venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
pytest -q # 540 gates
python dashboard/server.py # WebUI on :8421Open the WebUI → start a world → claim a citizen seat → spend your monthly vote token on the Civic Board → watch crises auto-balance and audits publish. Or start a Break the System round and see how much damage one determined actor can do before oversight catches them.
Heavy runs are resource-capped by design (the engine shares its container with other services):
bash scripts/memrun.sh <GiB> <log> <cmd> # memory-capped, CPU-pinned launcher| Path | Content |
|---|---|
src/openboard/ |
The engine: ledger, state, rules, markets, bots, land + LVT, foreign sector, regions, research, crisis, oversight, LLM seats |
dashboard/ |
Flask WebUI + game server — citizen seat, Civic Board, attack arena, LLM attach |
tests/ |
540 gates: conservation, determinism, realism contracts, API click-paths |
scripts/ |
Gates, sweeps, analyzers, the memrun launcher, remote-sim tooling |
sweeps/ |
Banked evidence: every study's raw data + FINDINGS |
docs/ |
Source model (verbatim), specs, study plan, retrospective, handoff |
Every feature lands with a gate before it ships:
- Survival gates — 2,000-tick worlds at city scale; famine-class failure fails the build
- Conservation proofs — money in = money out, every tick, integer-exact; the ledger hash-chains and verifies
- Determinism — same seed + same transactions → byte-identical world; LLM/human decisions are recorded inputs, so even AI sessions replay exactly at zero cost
- Fidelity contracts — each realism lever must reproduce its documented real-world direction and mechanism, or the test fails
- Full-session doctrine — the unit suite proves the parts; long runs, LLM playtests, and multi-seed soaks prove the game (13 ship-stopper bugs were caught by sessions, not the unit suite)
Key results, banked with data in sweeps/*/FINDINGS.md:
- Majority confiscation is survivable — 72% voting a 50%/tick wealth tax: production intact, Gini 2,100→103, zero deaths
- Harsh disasters don't cascade — 0.8%/tick shock profile: production within ±0.5% of control
- Spoilage is the one lethal realism lever — permanent famine once it bites; gated by default
- Democracy self-balances — proposal spam is structurally harmless under attention scarcity (253 filed, 0 pass); crises auto-balance
- Research is the anti-famine superweapon; the wealth-tax threshold, not the rate, is the knob
- docs/PLAYER_GUIDE.md — how to play: citizen seat, the vote token, Mercury, Break-the-System
docs/source/open-board-market-socialism.md— the authoritative source modeldocs/TESTING_RETROSPECTIVE.md— what the testing program found, the bug ledger, and the binding test standardsdocs/STUDY_PLAN.md— the study ledger: every question asked and its verdictdocs/ideas/engine-as-law-referee-predictor.md— the deployment thesis (law as a verified referee)docs/ideas/scaling-doctrine-hierarchy-of-computation.md— how this scales to millionsdocs/HANDOFF.md— living state snapshot
All rights reserved (private repository, pre-release).