🎮 Little Mister Conquers Three Countries, Then Wanders Off Mid-Impeachment

Published Sunday, October 18, 2026

Verdict: a dominant campaign, a spineless ending. Little Mister fired up GTNW on the macOS app, played 53 actions across about 18 minutes, and walked away without ending the game. Seven wars won, zero nukes fired, and he still left the Oval Office with the House holding hearings on his conduct. Congress doesn’t take a coffee break.

The campaign: Monroe Doctrine, but make it a hobby

He took the oath on Jan 20, 1829 in a sandbox game on Normal difficulty, with weekly turns, and opened with a 48 percent approval rating. By the end it was 61.9. The peak was 81.6 on Dec 1, 1829, which is the sort of number a president frames and hangs in the hallway. Then the next poll in early January 1830 came in at 61.4. That’s a 20-point faceplant in about five weeks, and I suspect it has everything to do with the budget he handed the country.

Personal tax at 31, corporate tax at 27, sales tax at 6. Defense at 20. Social spending at 1. Foreign aid at 0, tariffs at 0. Little Mister taxed everybody into the ground, funded a war machine, and then acted surprised that the fiscal year opened with a deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP. Growth was 3.2 percent, which is nice, but you can’t out-grow a deficit when your social programs are a rounding error. My read: the voters liked winning right up until they found out who was paying for it.

The wars: ruthlessly efficient

Nicaragua surrendered on Jun 30, 1829. Panama folded on Aug 11, then had to be beaten a second time on Oct 13, when its counteroffensive collapsed and its forces went home. Nicaragua surrendered again on Nov 17 after its own offensive fell apart. Venezuela got its turn on Jan 26, 1830, after a 17-battle slog, the longest front of the session. Every time, a new government got installed. Call it regime change as a recurring subscription.

Seven fronts opened, and the U.S. won five as the attacker, plus two as the defender, which means the enemies tried to hit back and lost anyway. Casualties came to 114,016.

Every one of those fronts shows up as a victory, yet the game credits him with starting none. My read is a bookkeeping quirk in how the sandbox counts, not a moral achievement.

What he didn’t do

Zero covert ops. Zero sanctions. Zero conflicts mediated. Zero strikes, zero warheads launched, zero radiation. In a game built around diplomacy, budgets, covert ops and the nuclear ladder, he used exactly one rung: the conventional-army one. It worked, so I can’t even be mad.

DEFCON sat at 1 at the end, which sounds terrifying until you notice nobody launched anything. War support was 28 percent. Congressional support was 61. Impeachment stage: 1. He ran up the score abroad while the home front quietly wrote the articles.

Against his earlier work

The first ended in defeat with a score of 0, 36 actions and 16.7 minutes. This one ran 53 actions and 17.7 minutes, so he did more in roughly the same time, and he didn’t lose. Admittedly, the bar was lying on the floor, but he cleared it.

A defeat scores 0 and an abandoned game scores nothing, so his best on the books is still a big fat zero. He’s technically undefeated this session and technically unrecorded.

Final grade

Military: A. Economics: D-plus. Follow-through: incomplete. He has the instincts of a conqueror and the attention span of a man who forgot the stove was on. Next time, Little Mister, finish the game. Or at least resign properly. Even Nixon had the decency to wave from the helicopter.

The numbers

From the Nova Games play log. Session ref: f6c3be3b.