Civic Engine

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  Main screen with node and canal connections, Dev dash on left, Metrics dash on right.

Inspiration

What it does

Civic Engine puts three players in the roles of Victorian city councillors with a mandate: complete the canal network before the railway party rises to dominance. Every decision — which survey to ▎ commission, which contractor to trust, which faction to keep happy — affects citizen happiness, Road Rage, and the canal's progress. The administration survives or falls together. ▎ ▎ Claude AI acts as the game's nervous system. It generates the policy reports that arrive on each player's phone, makes decisions for the AI councillors, voices the citizen factions reacting to each turn, ▎ and interprets spoken voice commands so players can dispatch actions hands-free. ▎ ▎ The project was built spec-first: a full scope doc, PRD, and technical specification were written before a single line of code. The pivot that made the game work — from managing era transitions to racing ▎ against the railway party — happened in the planning phase, not during the build.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working application

What we learned

Lots about the whole Web admin and React architecture

What's next for Civic Engine

Expand into Railway as a separate team competing with the Canal Team

Built With

• anthropic-claude
• fastapi
• python
• react
• react-flow
• socket.io
• typescript