Two days before the Budget Speech, the plane carrying the Minister of Finance, the Deputy Minister, the Director-General and every Deputy Director-General but one goes down over the Karoo. Six days later you are Acting Director-General of the National Treasury, because everyone senior to you is dead and you are the person who knows where the Budget lives.
You have eleven months. The wage round is in April. The power utility wants R56 billion by June. The Medium Term Budget is in October, the reshuffle is in December, and the Budget you have to table in February will be judged on the year you are about to have.
Free. About two hours for one playthrough. Works on a phone. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.
Acting Appointment is a gamebook. You read a passage, you make a choice, you turn to the numbered section it sends you to. Along the way you keep three numbers: CREDIBILITY (whether markets and institutions believe what you announce), CAPITAL (the political room you have to move) and FISCAL SPACE (the headroom before the debt dynamics start running you). Every decision moves at least one of them, and no decision moves them all in the same direction.
There is also a fourth number. You do not get to see it.
The book has 170 sections and three endings, and none of them is about you — they are about the country five years on. Getting to the good one takes choices that would please a trade unionist and choices that would please a bond trader, in the right order, and even then it takes some luck. That is not a bug. That is the point.
Anyone can be told that the public-service wage bill is about a third of everything government spends, and that settling it generously forecloses other things. People generally believe it. It changes nothing about how they argue, because the constraint has never cost them anything.
A gamebook makes it cost something. You settle the wage round in April, and in October you stand in the House with a hole you made in April — and you remember why it seemed reasonable at the time. That is closer to memory than to knowledge, and it does what a lecture cannot.
The trade-offs are real. The numbers are calibrated against the actual Budget Review. The institutions are real; only the power utility has a made-up name. The book is set in the load-shedding years, deliberately, because you cannot see a trade-off in a good year — and it ends with a chapter that argues against itself, so that nobody comes away with fluent, confident opinions that they got from a model.
The full book in your browser. Your choices are tracked for you; the arithmetic is shown, never hidden. Start at §1.
The complete text as a PDF, laid out for A5 — the eight episodes, the debrief, and the footnotes that show where every number comes from. Print it, or read it on a tablet with a pencil.
A one-period version for a lecture or a classroom: four decisions, one die roll, and the reckoning, in 40–50 minutes. Every student plays alone on a one-page card. The pack has the run sheet the lecturer reads from, the slides, the student card, and the cards and poster for a conference-room version.
Acting Appointment is written by Waldo Krugell and is free to play, read and teach with. It is a model, and every model is an argument; the debrief chapter is where to start arguing. If you run it in a class, or you think a number is wrong, I would like to hear about it — contact me.
