Sovereign Handbook
Sovereign is a Hamilton-system board game about the founding of US public credit, plus a solo / digital adaptation that plays the same rules locally in a browser. This handbook covers what the game is, how to play, what the three opponent profiles do, and how the design got to v0.10.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”- Two artifacts, one design. A printable 34-sheet board game and a self-contained browser simulator — same rules.
- Solo play with deterministic AI. Two scripted opponents. Same seed plus same human decisions = byte-identical ledger every time.
- Three viable economic paths. Treasury / Finance dominates historically (59% of canonical wins at v0.10), Merchant / Infrastructure is the route economy (25%), Manufacturer / Industry is the late-game capacity build (16%).
- No network, no account, no cloud, no LLM. The full game lives in one HTML file.
- Getting started — install, first run, file map.
- How to play — the game loop, the board, the Acts of Congress, scoring.
- Profiles — the three scripted opponent strategies in detail.
- Reference — CLI flags, rules tables, save / load format, batch simulation.
- Design history — the v0.2 → v0.10 balance arc, with evidence.
- Security — threat model, data handling.
Why it exists
Section titled “Why it exists”The thesis of Sovereign is that public credit + federal finance were Alexander Hamilton’s dominant economic lever — but a Hamilton-system game must also let commerce and industry be viable paths to victory. The balance work (v0.2 → v0.10) was a nine-version, evidence-driven push to keep Treasury as the strongest profile (in line with history) without collapsing the design into a single-strategy game.
The full game source, balance evidence, and audit trail live in the mcp-tool-shop-org/sovereign repository.