Context
Grift Wars is a side project built with Claude. It takes the shape of Drug Wars, the 1984 trading game, and swaps the inventory for the assets of the presidency: pardons, golden visas, trade deals, Supreme Court seats and a $PREZ memecoin. You start $50,000 in the hole to a lender who does not send invoices, and you have 48 months in office. Net worth at the end of the term is the score.
Challenge
Drug Wars works because the maths is honest and the theme is not. The goal was satire that lands through the mechanics rather than the copy, so the design rule was simple: if a joke needs a punchline, the mechanic is not doing its job yet. That meant getting the economy genuinely right, with prices, debt, interest and risk all balanced so the optimal strategy is also the joke.
It also meant clear ground rules. The player is an unnamed, fictional composite shown only as THE PRESIDENT. The targets are institutions, incentives and mechanisms, never individuals, and no real person is ever quoted or pictured.
Approach
Each turn is one month. You arrive somewhere, the prices reroll, a news wire may announce a shock, and you buy and sell against your cash and capacity. Debt compounds at a rate drawn once per run, and can only be paid down at The Club. Cash banked with the Shell Company in Delaware earns interest and is invisible to investigators, which makes it the most important mechanic in the game.
Heat rises with the value of what you are carrying, not what you have earned, and it triggers an investigation ladder: a reporter, a congressional subpoena, a special counsel, and finally impeachment. Every rung short of the top costs you money rather than your freedom. That asymmetry is the argument the game makes.
Technically the whole game is a single HTML file with no framework and no build step. All state lives in one plain object and changes only through a pure reducer, runs use a seeded random number generator so any game can be replayed, and every commodity, location and event lives in data tables so balance changes never touch logic. Separate simulation scripts play thousands of runs headlessly to check the balance before any change ships. One example: the bank rate sits at 4% per turn because at 6% the best strategy becomes “bank everything at turn 10 and stop playing”.
Outcome
Grift Wars is playable now at grift-wars.dermotdooley.com. It is keyboard-first with full touch support and plays one-handed on a phone, and a local leaderboard keeps track of your best terms. Next up is wrapping the same build for iOS and Android with Capacitor.