Social Democracy: An Alternate History

About the game

It is January 1928. Germany is a young republic, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) is the largest party in the Reichstag but is not in government, and the Great Depression, the Communists to your left and the Nazis to your right are all waiting. You lead the SPD, and your goal is to keep democracy alive.

Each turn is a month. You have a few actions, spent through cards: advisors, each with their own faction and ideas; party affairs, such as building the party's base; and, when you are in office, government affairs like the economy, the army, the courts and the budget. Events arrive from the headlines, and elections are simulated on the numbers you have built. A sidebar tracks the resources, the composition of the Reichstag, inflation and the polls, and a long Library section explains the period, the parties and the people, so you do not need to know the history to play. A "historical mode" turns saving, loading and polls off. Difficulty goes from easy to hard.

Autumn Chen made it in 2024 using her Dendry-based engine and drew on a long reading list of histories, which the in-game Credits lists, to model the parties and the choices of the time. It is a strategy game written like a book: much of the fun is in reading what happens.

Playing it here

Click Play now, then Start game and pick a difficulty. You act by clicking the options and the cards in your hand. The Library link at the top opens the reference pages, Status shows the numbers, and Options turns backgrounds, event images and animations on or off. Your game autosaves as you go, and Save/Load has manual slots and exports. The Mods menu of the original, which loaded games from addresses typed by the player, is not included. The original build has no music, so the Music option does nothing.

A few things worth knowing

Content note. The game is about the rise of Nazism and political violence in 1920s and 30s Germany. The text deals with antisemitism, killings and street fighting, and some of the period posters and photographs show Nazi symbols. The game is on the side of democracy and does not endorse them.

Read the Library first. It is long, but the choices are much clearer after the first few pages.

It is meant to be hard. The historical outcome is not guaranteed to be avoided, and failure is part of the story.

Credits and licence

Written by Autumn Chen. The code and text are under the MIT licence. The images are credited in the game's Credits screen, with their authors and licences: public domain, CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0 (including many from the German Federal Archives) and CC BY 3.0. Images without a free licence were removed, and a plain silhouette stands in for a few advisor portraits. The licence texts are linked from this page. It also uses jQuery 1.11.1 (MIT), d3.js v7 (ISC), and d3-parliament (MIT).