Everyone’s a loser in Strait of Hormuz game that simulates global crisis

play a bad hand well

It may seem like it’s a lot to rack your brain for a game that can be played in 15 to 20 minutes, but for the most part it’s a surprisingly accessible experience. The game offers plenty of explanations and news articles that you can click on to better understand the real-world context and outcomes of the game.

However, each ship accepted for transit costs more or the game advances 10 playable days between March 3 and April 13, 2026. You have the option of not sending any ships through the strait on any given day, but this could lead to disappointing end results such as “empty shelves” and “desalination collapse” for Gulf states facing food insecurity and shortages of fresh water from energy-starved desalination plants.

If you manage to diffuse the chaos and prevent all factions from escalating, the final game results still provide plenty of charts and numbers to remind you that the real-life Strait of Hormuz crisis is far from over. Even squeezing several dozen ships into 10 days – the best-case shipping scenario in the game – is a far cry from the pre-war average of 130 ships passing through the strait every day. The inadequacy of that shipping rate continues to have daily real world consequences.

Gornicki designed and built the game himself in 17 days, executing the game’s underlying code with the help of an AI coding tool, which he described in a press kit as “audited and perfected every step of the way.” They included shipping data from sources such as Windward Maritime Intelligence and Lloyd’s List, as well as over 125 verified and linked news articles.

“Chokepoint is not a story you read once and put down – it comes back to us every week, in fuel prices, in fertilizer shortages, in food security in places far from any tanker,” Gornicki said. “I wanted to give people a form of this reporting that they couldn’t avoid.”