The game's historical scenarios drop you into the worst quarters British monetary policy has faced, with the same information the people in the chair had. Each one comes with the real story — what happened, what the policymakers believed at the time, and what the record now shows. Read first or play first; they argue with each other either way.
OPEC has quadrupled the oil price, the miners are on strike, and inflation is already in double digits with wage settlements chasing it upward. This is the scenario about the wage-price spiral: what happens when a country stops believing prices will ever be stable again, and how many years of pain it takes to change its mind. UK inflation would peak at 24.2% — the game lets you find out whether you could have kept it lower.
Britain has pegged the pound to the Deutschmark, and defending the peg means holding interest rates far higher than the recession-hit economy can bear. The markets know it. This is the scenario about fighting a constraint you cannot win against — and about what happened on the day the constraint snapped, when leaving the ERM turned a humiliation into the quiet start of the inflation-targeting era.
Inflation is 5.2% and the Committee has spent the year worrying about it. What arrives instead is a demand collapse: banks failing, credit vanishing, and a Bank Rate cut from 5% to 0.5% in six months — then seven years stuck there. This is the scenario where the interest rate runs out of road and asset purchases become the only lever left, and where the deflation trap is closer than it ever looks.
The pandemic left the Bank with rates at 0.1% and hundreds of billions of asset purchases on the books — and then Russia invaded Ukraine and European energy prices went vertical. Inflation reached 11.1%, the highest in forty years, while every rate rise squeezed households already paying more for gas. This is the scenario about tightening into a supply shock with the balance sheet still loaded from fighting the last crisis.
Unlike the modern game, nothing in a scenario is random: the shocks arrive on the quarters history delivered them, the same for every player, so scores are comparable. What the model can and cannot reproduce about each era is set out honestly in each article and in how the model works.