Strait Sweeper

Minesweeper, played on the world's actual maritime chokepoints.

Seven theatres: Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab, Malacca, the Denmark Strait, the Danish Straits, the Florida Straits, the Northwest Passage. The boards are satellite and terrain imagery, so the coastlines are the real ones. Mines hide only in water. Land is always safe, which turns every peninsula into cover and every open channel into the part you have been avoiding.

Ninety-nine mines at the Admiral tier.

Above the board runs a news ticker. Crude, diesel, hull insurance, polling, and the midterm returns arriving state by state. It escalates the longer you take. By the third tier the treasury auction is failing and California is withholding federal tax payments. None of it touches the board. The wire is telling you to hurry, the board does not care, and hurrying is how you lose.

I built it because the minesweeper loop is probabilistic inference under threat of instant total loss, and that sits close enough to how strategic decisions get narrated that the satire wrote itself. You are not solving the Strait of Hormuz. You are clicking squares while a screen yells.

There is a trailer, twenty-seven seconds of jingoistic voiceover cut over the boards. It ends "Paid for by nobody. Endorsed by nobody. Historical accuracy: pending."

Play it at erikbethke.com/sweeper.

The headlines on the wire are invented, except a handful that paraphrase real reporting. The ticker is labelled SATIRE in game because the two are hard to tell apart, which was less a design goal than a discovery.