I built Coalition Chaos, a free South African political game, as part of Counted. It takes the council seat numbers from the election results and gives you the bargaining table.
Choose a municipality, pick your parties and put together a majority. Then roll the dice. A partner might walk out. Your deal might hold. Madam Speaker, a secretary bird with a gavel, has opinions either way.
It runs in your browser on a phone or computer, with no download or signup. You can also watch the 20-second trailer on YouTube.
The numbers behind the deal
In a hung council, no party has more than half the seats. Being the biggest party doesn’t give you a majority on its own. The interesting question becomes: who has enough seats together?
Coalition Chaos lets you try those combinations. Tap a party to add its seats to your deal. The majority marker shows how far you still have to go, or how much room you have to spare. A small party can become the partner you can’t afford to lose.
You can start in Johannesburg, try eThekwini, or use the council picker to explore another municipality. The game links back to the underlying results, so the seat arithmetic is there to inspect.
Then comes the chaos
Reaching a majority unlocks a fictional plot twist. The game tests what happens to your deal when support changes, and shows the arithmetic behind the outcome. Every roll starts from your original selection. You can try a different set of partners or share your combination with someone else.
The game uses council seat data from Counted, drawn from the IEC’s election results. The scenarios are political satire. They don’t predict negotiations, report a new political event or establish that a real coalition exists. The game’s fixed majority target is also a simplification: real council decisions can have different voting rules.
Some of the commentary has a backstory in South African politics. Where it draws on history, the game includes dated context and sources. The fictional scenario remains separate from that history.
A game inside an election project
Counted is my independent project for making South African election results easier to explore and reuse. It includes local results, maps, comparisons across elections and a public API.
Coalition Chaos approaches one part of those results through play. You can see the same council from several possible combinations of parties, and immediately see what losing a partner does to the numbers.
The website is built with Astro, TypeScript and Cloudflare Workers. The game uses pixel-art characters and a council chamber, with its rules running in the browser. The source is on GitHub.
Originally published on Jacques Blom.