Red Box: Chancellor Simulator

You are the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is September 2026, the removal vans have gone, the Treasury's first submission is on your desk, and the country owes nearly £3 trillion. Your first Budget is the real one: 28 October 2026. Good luck. Red Box is a political strategy game about running Britain's economy, and about learning how it really works. Every month the red box arrives full of decisions. A Health Secretary wants winter money. A newspaper is on deadline. The backbenches are in revolt. A gilt auction went badly. Choose, and live with it. EVERY NUMBER IS REAL Debt near £3 trillion. Borrowing of £115 billion a year. Debt interest that costs more than defence. Every figure comes from the OBR, HM Treasury or the ONS. Tap the ⓘ beside any number to see its source, and collect all 287 facts in the Codex. DELIVER THE BUDGET Twice a year you stand at the despatch box. Take a Treasury package, or set every tax from nought to 99 per cent and every department's budget yourself. The scorecard shows what you raise, spend and borrow, and what your plan does in real terms. A flat budget while prices rise is still a cut. Push a tax past what the country will believe and the Prime Minister finds a new Chancellor. Then give the speech, read the front pages, and take the Finance Bill through the House. MONEY DOESN'T WAIT FOR BUDGET DAY Agree a pay deal in March and it comes out of the Treasury Reserve that day, just as it does in real life. The Reserve runs out. Sit across the table from the unions in pay talks. Say yes to everything and the gilt market starts pricing your signature. CUTS HAVE CONSEQUENCES Starve a department and its service starts to fail. The prisons fill, the waiting lists grow, and the trouble spreads to the economy. Only funding ends it. EVERYONE IS SOMEBODY Fifty-four characters are dealt into every job each run: the Cabinet, the Prime Minister, your advisers, every editor and every union chair. A different government every time. FLEET STREET IS WATCHING Seven fictional newspapers, each with its own politics and its own Treasury correspondent. They ring you for a line before they run a story. Give a statement, send in your Director of Communications, or say nothing and watch it run at full strength. Take an editor to lunch. Float a draft Budget and see what tomorrow's front pages make of it. THE HOUSE, THE CABINET AND NO. 10 The division bell rings and you walk a lobby: aye, no or abstain, with the whips watching. The decisions you take send their own bills to the floor. Read what each one really does before you vote. Keep the Cabinet on side, or lose them to the leak columns. When your polling slides, the Prime Minister will want a word. ANY PARTY CAN WIN Pick the party that won and live with its manifesto. Labour, the Conservatives, Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Northern Ireland parties are all playable, each with its own pledges, its own Prime Minister and its own cards, all on the same footing. Elections come round every four years, and a hung parliament means a coalition with a price. SURVIVE, OR DON'T Lose the PM's confidence and you're sacked. Lose the markets and there's a gilt crisis with your name on it. Win elections with an economy worth defending. And if the Prime Minister becomes a liability, the party may come looking for you. A government can last twenty years. MYSTERY CHANCELLOR No party and no manifesto. Choose your constituency, govern for two years, and the game tells you whose side you were really on. WEEKLY CRISIS One crisis a week, the same for every player, with its own leaderboard. Play at your own pace: hold the clock, or let the government run and step in when it matters. Playable with VoiceOver, at any text size, and without colour. No ads. No subscription. No account needed. Sign in only if you want your name on the leaderboards. From the team behind UK Fact Check Politics.