hamurabi game sourced
Hamurabi
A ten-turn text game in which the player, as the Babylonian king Hammurabi, splits a grain stock between feeding people, planting acres, and buying land while harvests, rats, and plague vary at random.
core loop
read the steward's yearly report -> trade grain for land at a random price -> allocate grain to food and seed -> harvest, rats, arrivals, and plague resolve -> next year
design notes
Three stocks (people, acres, bushels of grain) and three yearly allocations make the whole game one stock-and-flow puzzle: grain is food, seed, and the currency for land at once, so every bushel has competing uses. Randomness enters only through harvest yield, rat losses, a land price of 17 to 26 bushels per acre, arrivals, and a plague that halves the population, so the player manages expected value under variance. Dyment wrote it in FOCAL for the PDP-8 from a description of The Sumerian Game (1964); David Ahl's BASIC version spread it as a type-in listing and seeded Kingdom, Dukedom, and Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio.
relations
6 stored edgesCrop cultivation
Planted acres consume seed grain and return a random yield per acre at year end; each person can farm only a set amount of land, so labor caps planting.
Goods consumption
People must be fed grain each year; if at least 45 percent starve in one round the game ends early.
Turn structure
Ten rounds, each one year: a status report, then three typed decisions (acres to buy or sell, bushels to feed, acres to plant) before the year resolves.
Advisors
Each round opens with a steward's report of births, deaths, harvest, rat losses, and land price.
claims
1 with sourcesHamurabi derives from The Sumerian Game (1964) by Mabel Addis and William McKay; Dyment wrote the FOCAL version after learning of it, and David Ahl expanded it in BASIC.