A built-up riverfront in the game. Image: permit.petercai.com.

SimCity with the god mode removed. You are an elected mayor, and nothing gets built until it has survived the neighbors.

Rezone an empty lot for a twelve-story apartment block and the game files an application. Nearby homeowners organize over parking and “neighborhood character.” At the hearing you trade height for parking, the building shrinks to six stories, and the smaller project no longer pays. Then comes the appeal, and perhaps a lawsuit. The landing page walks through exactly this case, and it is the whole game in miniature: every improvement creates a new group of voters who are angry about it.

Underneath is a real economy. Residents have ages, incomes and homes; businesses hire, grow and leave; land values, rents, jobs and taxes all feed one another. On top sits the politics: a seven-seat council, a pool of clout to spend, an election every four years, and the rule that high-turnout groups carry more weight than their numbers. Heatmaps and plain-language explanations show which decision made which voters angry.

The local paper, The Gazette, is where it turns funny. Its headlines run to items like “Final Quarter Mile of Lake Fairview Trail Enters Third Decade of Review” and a notice that the City Hall notice board is full, so notices about the board will be posted elsewhere.

There are four starting points: a 200-resident hamlet, a 2,000-person town, a 25,000-resident suburb, and the 300,000-resident Unaffordable Metropolis. It is a sandbox, with no campaign and no win screen. The city goes on as long as the voters let you. A game begins paused.

It is free, runs in a desktop or laptop browser with no account or download, keeps saves on your computer, and works offline after the first visit. It is by Peter Cai, who posted it as “SimCity, but with Permits” on Hacker News, where it drew several hundred points. He said he began by refusing to hide the complexity, then found during playtesting that revealing it in layers worked better. Some players hit a memory error on loading; he said he added a lower-resolution texture fallback. Eminent domain and covenants are on his list for a later update.