A short browser game about the hardest job in British economic policy. One decision a quarter, twenty quarters, about three minutes.
Hold or Hike makes you Governor of the Bank of England and hands you Bank Rate for a five-year term starting in August 2026. Inflation is 2.6%, unemployment is 4.9%, and the Middle East is on fire. Each quarter you set the rate, the Monetary Policy Committee tells you what it would have done, and the economy responds — a quarter later, which is the whole problem.
You are scored on holding inflation between 1% and 3% and unemployment between 3% and 5%, in the same quarter. Those two fight each other, which is the entire job.
It runs entirely in your browser. No account, no sign-up, nothing uploaded: your medals and best score live on your own device and nowhere else.
Monetary policy is argued about constantly and felt almost never. Everybody has a view on whether the Bank should have moved sooner in 2021. Very few people have had to make that call knowing the medicine takes a year to work, that the neutral rate is unobservable, and that a war might start next quarter.
Three minutes of this teaches the trade-off better than an hour of reading about it. That is the whole argument for the thing.
The starting conditions are real August 2026 figures, the shock scale is drawn from the 1975 and 2022 episodes, and the relationships — the Phillips curve trade-off, policy lags, expectations de-anchoring, a moving neutral rate — are the ones central banks actually reason about.
It is still a toy. Six equations against an economy of 68 million people, with no fiscal policy, no housing market, no banking system and a single interest rate standing in for a yield curve. The full method, including what it deliberately ignores, is set out in how the model works. Do not trade on it.
Free, no sign-up, works in any modern phone or desktop browser · about three minutes a term · twenty quarters covering Q3 2026 to Q2 2031 · inflation can reach 25% and unemployment 18% in the worst runs · eight unlockable medals · results share as a grid of green and red quarters, one row per year.
Questions about the model, screenshots, or anything else: hello@holdorhike.com
Happy to explain any of the design choices, or to provide a written summary of the equations for anyone writing about it.