A city-builder where every apartment block must survive hearings and lawsuits

How the game works

Permit Pending simulates residents, businesses, rents and land values. Projects from apartments to bus lanes go through hearings, objections, lawsuits and appeals. You negotiate concessions on a seven-seat council and face reelection every four years, where high-turnout groups carry outsized influence. Diagnostics (heatmaps, plain-language explanations) show why voters are angry.

Four scenarios run from Blank Slate (200 residents) to The Unaffordable Metropolis (300,000). No account needed; it works offline after the first visit.

The simulation is a toy; the rules engine under it is not

A commenter whose profile lists govstream.ai as their employer said the company built a similar internal game:

"The game was vibecoded, but it can run using the same rules as a city in our actual system. The simulation game is really just a toy… but the rules engine is an actual thing in our product."

Players were less kind about onboarding. A product and startup creator liked the subject but said the game "fails in execution", with an AI-written wall of text on inspecting a property and a toolbar full of controls from the first minute. The author, replying as the game's creator, took the other critiques in stride and said eminent domain and covenants are coming in the next update, while the rest go in the backlog until they can be done "tastefully".

The thread suggests the open question is less whether permitting is slow than whether a game can teach it without reproducing the overload it is mocking.