A hand-written politics game beat Minecraft on Apple's paid chart. The input was 300 scenarios

A mobile game made by a developer in Manchester recently beat Minecraft to the top of Apple's paid games chart, according to the BBC [s1c1]. The game is No 10: Full Confidence by Benjamin Brewis, in which the player is UK prime minister and tries to stay in office [s1c2], and the thing worth studying is not the ranking but the input: more than 300 fictional political scenarios, handwritten by Brewis [s1c3].

The system underneath is small. Players balance the moods of four factions - cabinet, backbenchers, the media and the public [s1c4]. Each scenario offers three actions, any of which can please or annoy a faction [s1c5], and if one side turns against you completely, the run ends [s1c6]. Multiply the stated scenario count by the choice count and you get a floor of roughly 900 authored branches [s1d1]. No procedural generation is described in the BBC's account, no live-service treadmill, no world simulation. The differentiated asset is prose.

That prose is dated on purpose. Brewis says he started building around December 2025, when talk of challenges to Sir Keir Starmer's leadership was growing, and thought "someone should just start taking the mick out of this" [s1c7]. Five people have occupied No 10 since 2016, three of them within just over three years, one for 49 days [s1c8]. Dr Russell Foster of King's College London told the BBC that the churn of prime ministers and the growing presence of politics on social media help explain why Westminster is turning up on phones [s1c9]. The material is free, recent and shared, which is exactly the condition under which hand-authoring beats scale: you cannot procedurally generate a joke about a specific fridge.

The writing shows its sources. Brewis cites the MP who threatened colleagues with a spider and Boris Johnson walking into a fridge as inspirations he was "frantically writing down" [s1c10], and one multi-part storyline involves a lobbyist releasing a dog into the House of Lords during a vet bill [s1c11]. The BBC's reporter lasted one year and nine months as a fictional PM, undone by press distrust after a resigning minister's three-page letter was read out on Radio 4 [s1c12]. Brewis says one player has survived 1,885 months, or 157 years [s1c13] - about 90 times the reporter's run [s1d2].

The genre is filling in. Fantasy Parliament, a browser game by UK developer Evan Roberts, lets players draft real MPs and score them on real-life media coverage [s1c14], with a Policy Tester that answers typed proposals in the voice of invented voter segments such as Coastal Keith and Graduate Gemma [s1c15]. UK Politics Simulator from Scarborough's Black Cannon Games, described as built on real UK data down to ward level, is reportedly due later this year on PC [s1c16].

Watch the decay. Brewis's game was 5th in Apple's UK paid games chart at the time of the BBC's report, above Monopoly Go [s1c17], and a topical library ages at the speed of the news it satirises. The open questions are whether 300 scenarios can be refreshed fast enough to hold that position, whether the data-driven entrants ship on schedule, and whether Brewis converts a chart spike into a repeat writing cadence. He says he does not know whether any politicians have played it [s1c18].