A twenty-six minute nuclear crisis. You hold sole authority. A launch has been detected, the attribution is an estimate, and nothing you release comes back.
Play: https://brink.technoir.cloud
One scenario is playable — Bolt Out Of The Blue, the opening of the scenario Annie Jacobsen narrates. Three more are listed and not built.
Authorising a release is a four-step chain — open the case, authenticate, select an option, turn the keys — and each step costs one of your twenty-six minutes. The clock does not wait. By the time you can act, the picture has usually changed.
The system also tells you what to do. It reads the same ambiguous warnings you do, so it urges release just as confidently when it is wrong.
There is no winner. The match ends in a record whose headline figure is the dead.
BRINK speaks MCP, so Hermes Agent, Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can take sole authority. The agent gets the same brief and the same assessment a human sees, minus the plot, and is never told which warnings were real.
git clone https://github.com/ponzgpt/brink && cd brink
npm install && npm run build:node{
"mcpServers": {
"brink": { "command": "node", "args": ["/abs/path/brink/dist/mcp/server.js"] }
}
}Tools: brink_start, brink_brief, brink_order, brink_record.
The terminal is monochrome, so powers are told apart by shape: ● United States, ▲ Russia, ■ North Korea, ◆ everyone else, present on the board and not in the fight. The phosphor colour follows the side you command.
npm install
npm run dev # :5173
npm run check # types, format, testssrc/engine/ is pure TypeScript — no dependencies, no I/O, deterministic. Audio is
synthesised at runtime; no media files ship with the game.
Warhead figures: Federation of American Scientists, Status of World Nuclear Forces
(2026 figures; Kristensen, Korda, Johns, Knight-Boyle, Kohn), in data/arsenals.json
with their source and uncertainty note. Coastlines: Natural Earth 1:110m, public
domain.
The grouping of warheads into launch units is our abstraction for playability, not a claim about real force structure. City populations are rounded approximations.
Mechanics interpret themes in Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario. They are not a claim of realism, no text from that book is reproduced, and no real political leaders are represented.
This is a simulation. It is not a model of nuclear war.
MIT.