Road Network Manager

About this game

💻 Although this game works on tablets and phones, it was designed for desktops and laptops — us Civil Engineers, you know!

Road Network Manager is a teaching game about road asset management: you look after a simulated network for ten years on a fixed annual budget, and your score is the condition you achieve per dollar spent, measured against simply doing nothing at all.

The engineering ideas it is built to make tangible:

• Deterioration is probabilistic. Roads decay as a Markov process — each month a road either holds its condition or slips one state, and the worse it gets, the faster it slips. You manage risk, not certainty.
• Money spent late buys less. Cheap treatments work well on moderately worn roads but become unreliable — and can mask underlying defects — once a road is badly deteriorated. Timing is the craft.
• Neglect converts capital into forced spend. Poor roads trigger routine-maintenance call-outs that count against your score even though they never fix anything.
• Prioritisation under scarcity. The budget never stretches to everything; ranking rules (worst first, benefit÷cost, …) produce very different outcomes from the same intentions.
• Fair comparison. Every game is seeded: the same seed always builds the identical network and the identical no-intervention future, so scores with a matching seed, challenge and level are directly comparable between players.

Level 1 is hands-on: click treatments onto roads in real time. Level 2 is the real lesson: write a policy — a decision table plus a ranking rule — and watch it manage the network for you.

How do I compare my score with a colleague? See a worked example →

Comparing scores — a worked example

Because every game is seeded, two people who use the same setup play the identical network with the identical no-intervention future — so any difference in score is purely a difference in decisions. Here is how you and a colleague would run an exact head-to-head:

1. Agree the full setup together — every value in the New game panel. For example: seed bridge52, 50 segments, challenge normal, rollover off, Level 1. The seed can be any number or word; segment count and challenge matter just as much, so agree all of them.
2. Each play your own game with exactly those settings, on your own machine, without watching each other.
3. At game over, copy your Share code from the Share code card in the debrief — a short scrambled string that encodes your seed, challenge, level and score — and send it to your colleague by whatever means you like.
4. Paste their code into the debrief's "Paste a friend's code to compare" box and press Compare. You get a side-by-side table of both results, and the game confirms whether the two runs were directly comparable (same seed, challenge and level).
5. Higher benefit–cost score wins — the most network condition gained per dollar, not the most money spent.

Share codes carry a checksum, so a mistyped or tampered code is politely refused rather than misread.

Game hints

• It is a stochastic simulation. Every road follows a monthly Markov chain: each month it either keeps its condition state or advances one state worse, with transition probabilities that rise as condition worsens. Randomness is seeded — the same seed replays identically.
• Do nothing: deterioration only ever runs one way, it accelerates as roads worsen, and very poor roads never recover on their own — they just sit there generating routine-maintenance call-outs that count against your score.
• Resurfacing (cheap): reliably resets a moderately worn road to good condition, but the worse the starting state, the less certain the reset — and resurfacing a badly deteriorated road can hide its defects rather than fix them, leaving it prone to rapid re-deterioration.
• Rehabilitation (expensive): a near-certain reset to good condition from any state, and it repairs accumulated damage rather than papering over it.
• Play with a policy in mind. Before you start, decide a rule such as "always apply treatment X when condition reaches Y", follow it, and judge the outcome. Refine the rule between games — the score rewards condition gained per dollar, not activity.
• House rules: one treatment per segment per year, and the budget renews annually — use it or lose it, unless rollover is on.