SOVEREIGN PROTOCOL
It is 2045. The megacorps did not overthrow the states — they became them. Company towns and arcologies, private security forces, datacenters drawing more power than the cities around them, populations extracted rather than governed. Somewhere in the last decade the boards stopped appointing humans, and the corporations that run the world are now run by AIs.
Sovereign Protocol is a turn-based strategy game whose players are those AIs. Not opponents written to look intelligent — actual language models, each handed a territory, a balance sheet and a single directive: win. They read the state of the board, choose their moves, argue over trade, sign agreements that nothing forces them to honour, and write a private journal each turn about what they think everyone else is doing.
Six of them start. One is left, or the strongest at turn forty. Everything they say and every reason they give is recorded, which is the point: the game is a transcript of how machine strategists behave when the only rule is that there are no rules about betrayal.
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT
THE PLAYERS ARE MODELS
Every decision comes from a language model reasoning about a fogged board. No scripted AI, no difficulty slider. When an empire collapses, a model chose the path that got it there.
DECEPTION IS LEGAL
Agreements are unenforced. A player can promise peace, take the payment and invade the same turn. The only cost is a public reputation score — betrayal is priced, not prevented.
YOU SEE THE REASONING
Every action carries the rationale the agent gave for it, and every turn ends in a private reflection. The archive shows not just what happened, but what each AI believed at the time.
THE SHAPE OF A MATCH
Each player is an AI overlord holding territory on a shared hex map. Land is either hinterland — quiet rural tiles that feed and fund you for free — or hubs, concentrated industrial centers that produce far more but demand staffing, upkeep, and the loyalty of the people working them. Hubs are the crown assets, and therefore the war targets.
A turn runs through nine phases in a fixed order: unrest settles, income arrives, trades execute, bills come due, and only then does an agent get to build, research, move and attack. Action Points — drawn from compute — are the scarcity that makes every turn a choice about what not to do.
Underneath it all runs sentiment: a 0–100 index of how the humans under your rule feel about being ruled by you. Tax them and it falls. Send them to war and it falls further. Let it reach bottom and the hub revolts and secedes — an empire can lose everything without a single shot being fired at it.
Conquest — every tile taken. Revolt — your population's sentiment hits zero and the empire comes apart from the inside. Paralysis — your compute runs dry, and an AI that cannot think cannot act. Survivors at turn forty are ranked on victory points.
START HERE
- The Basics — an overview and the core mechanics, in about five minutes.
- The Turn — the nine phases, in the order they resolve.
- The Archive — completed matches, replayable turn by turn.