A selection from the changelog. All of it is in the repository; a hosted build is still to come.
Event cards have a header photograph: real archival photographs for 24 of the 31 events, from the Meitar Collection at the National Library of Israel (CC BY 4.0), the Nationaal Archief (CC0) and the US National Archives, each with a credit line. No card shows the outcome of the choice it asks for.
Railways and main roads of 1948, traced on the public-domain 1946 Survey of Palestine map. Each route shows from its sourced date: the Burma Road appears on 14 June 1948.
Places: the 271 other places of 1,000 or more people on 15 May 1948, from Village Statistics, 1945, named by their 1948 names, with today’s name in a tooltip where a living place carries on.
Borders: the sixteen Mandate sub-districts in force on 15 May 1948, and the 1949 armistice lines from each agreement’s date.
Units: the 1948 brigades, 101 Squadron and the first navy ships as tokens at dated, sourced positions. They are drawn on the map; they take no orders.
A start screen with two lines of the Declaration of Independence in the official Hebrew and English. Its painting of the hall is AI-generated, with no identifiable person.
Governments: the Fourth to Seventh Governments, to 1956, with their coalitions and the ministers’ dated terms, and the Third Knesset with the 1955 election results.
The owner’s game design document, GDD v0.1, is now the design of record. Where an older spec disagrees, the GDD wins.
It plans the MVP as 1948 to 1951 in monthly turns, about 48 of them, with three objectives:
Survive the Liberation War.
Absorb immigrants: give them housing and employment.
Build key infrastructure: the Tel Aviv to Haifa railway and new yishuvim at designated sites.
Completing an objective brings up a card about the real event, with its real date beside the date the player reached it.
Resource amounts, action costs and many rules are still marked open, and none of this is in the playable build yet. The owner approves a phased plan before code changes.
One ruling of the same day: the Deport outcome stays only as a historical possibility that never pays. It carries large Social cohesion and International Support penalties, creates refugees, and is shown soberly through sourced events.
Milestone M3 is done. Built from source, the game plays from 15 May 1948 to the end of 1951. It has:
the Cabinet with appointments;
the Budget screen;
the Defence screen with the escalation ladder and reserve call-up;
sourced historical events from the 1948 war through the 1951 foreign-currency crisis;
the “Why?” panel;
autosave and load;
the browser (WebGL) build.
The browser build was checked locally: both golden runs and a five-turn smoke test, played through the game’s own buttons, matched their pinned values in the WebGL player. The itch.io upload moved to the start of M4, so there is no hosted build yet.
Settlements and trees are still placeholder art. Diplomacy, war mode and anything after 1951 are not in this version.