Of Rice and Rent

Of Rice and Rent is a multiplayer historical survival game where families struggle through economic upheaval, scarce work, rising debt, and impossible choices.

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Inspiration

History is mostly about dates, facts, famous leaders and conflicts, but it should also be about the hardships and tribulations faced by ordinary people: meals, rent, scarce work and difficult decisions.
I was inspired by stories such as Of Mice and Men, where large historical forces are felt through the lives of people simply trying to survive. I wanted to create a game that puts players inside that experience rather than asking them to memorize it. In Of Rice and Rent, players become families living through the economic upheaval of 1919–1942, balancing food, housing, health, debt, hope, and responsibility to their community. The game is also designed to spark discussion after play: how much does survival depend on personal choices, unequal circumstances, public policy and cooperation?

What it does

Of Rice and Rent is a historical learning experience led by a facilitator in which players survive economic phases through booms and busts. They receive different household backgrounds, choose action cards and compete for scarce resources or choose to share them. The final phase reveals the outcomes and debriefs each player on what they did right and wrong and how their outcome compares with historical realities.The game is designed for educational workshops and facilitated team-learning sessions.

How we built it

Codex with GPT-5.6 Sol acted as my engineering and game-design collaborator. It helped me prototype the interface and gameplay loop, implement a server-authoritative multiplayer architecture, protect private player state, create host controls, redesign the frontend and animations, and debug the game through repeated testing and real play sessions.

Challenges we ran into

Protecting private family information. Distinguishing the host from players. Preventing inactive players from blocking progress. Simplifying the interface. Managing extremely large Codex sessions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am happy I could turn a historical era of such complexity and depth into a playable multiplayer experience. I presented it at my team's weekly meeting and thought they would finish the game in about 20 minutes but actually it took them close to an hour because it can get so tactical. The game not only works, but it can leave players with a better understanding of how financial crises affect everyday life.At the end screen players would also see how they would've fared percentage wise compared to historical data.

What we learned

Codex thread and context management are very important, now I ask Codex to split the work into multiple threads which also saves time and have them talk with each other. AI models are great for building and bug fixing but human judgement or direction is also important and real users expose invisible problems with integration or replayability.

What's next for Of Rice and Rent

Add more polish and reliability to the game. I plan to integrate reconnection support, saved sessions, visible turn timers. As a second objective : more family backgrounds, bigger pool of scenarios/events and maybe regional circumstances would create and push players into new strategies.

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