How to Play Downing Draft

Downing Draft is a Prime Minister game where you choose an agenda, build your own cabinet and find out how long your government survives in Number 10. In Quick Play, one draft leads to a simulated premiership and its verdict. Here is how that run works.

1. Shape your government

You start in a Britain facing rising unemployment, high inflation and weak public confidence. Before you appoint anyone, you decide the kind of government you want to be:

• Economic approach: growth-led, balanced, or public-services first.
• Governing style: transformational, pragmatic, or popular.
• Priorities: the handful of areas you choose to focus on.
• Signature pledge: the defining policy your administration is built around.

These choices shape how everything that follows is judged.

2. Draft your cabinet

You draw real historical UK governments one at a time. From each, you pick a single politician to bring into your cabinet. Once chosen, a figure is yours, and is removed from the pools you draw later, so every game forces genuine trade-offs. You have a limited number of re-rolls if a draw doesn't suit you.

3. Assign your ministers

Each politician is placed into a cabinet role. Some are natural fits for a role; others are a stretch. How well your ministers suit their briefs, and how well the cabinet holds together as a team, feeds directly into how your government performs.

4. Discover your legacy

With your government assembled, the simulation runs. You find out how long you survived, what the country looked like by the end, how your signature pledge fared, why you ultimately left office, and the personal legacy title history assigns you, from The Architect to The Caretaker to The Underachiever. Then you can share your result and challenge others to last longer.

Play in your browser or on mobile

Quick Play is a free UK government game you can play in your browser without signing up. If you want to make governing decisions over a longer career, In Office is available in the Downing Draft app for iPhone, iPad and Android.

For how results are calculated at a high level, see the Methodology. Want the real-world background? See How UK Government Works. Ready? Build your government.