Every mechanic in Lawmaker so far has been something your country does to itself — legislate, negotiate, quietly panic over a budget. This is the first one that happens to the entire world at the same moment, and then lets you watch every other country make a completely different call.
The whole world gets asked the same question, at once
A global decision arrives with no warning. One scenario, one headline, and you decide how your country responds. Every active country in the world receives the identical dilemma at the identical moment.
Every choice lists exactly what happens if it wins — some of it pure flavour, some of it a real "budget impact" carrying a cost or a credit. And that cost line isn't hand-typed flavour text guessing at a number: it's generated straight from the same figures that actually hit your treasury, so what you read on the card before you vote can never quietly disagree with what lands on your budget page afterwards.
One party, one vote — and you have to say why
Voting follows the game's usual public-politics rules, with one twist: it's one party, one vote, full stop. Not weighted by seats, not weighted by legislature presence — a tiny party with zero seats casts exactly the same vote as the party running the government.
That reason is locked the instant you submit it — the same rule this blog covered for demand pledges back in Dispatch Nº 003: no second thoughts, no quiet editing after the fact. And unlike a pledge, there's nothing private about a decision vote at all — every cast vote and every reason is visible to the whole country, and the whole world, the moment it's submitted.
A tiny party with no seats carries exactly as much weight as the party running the country.
Twelve days, then the whole world finds out together
Once triggered, a decision stays open for 24 game days for every country at once, and every country resolves on that same dispatches. If a country ties — including the zero-votes case, nobody bothering to show up at all — the result falls to the decision's default choice, flagged plainly as a "deadlock default" so nobody mistakes it for a real majority.
Because every country tallies its own votes and resolves entirely on its own terms, the world's answers to the exact same dilemma can end up scattered however the politics falls out — two neighbours handed the identical earthquake can walk away having made opposite calls, and both are right, for their own country.
| Country | Outcome | Tally |
|---|---|---|
| Avalon | Send them · majority | 14–3 |
| Rheinland | Keep them at home · deadlock default | 9–9 |
| Columbia | Keep them at home · deadlock default | 0–0 |
| Marianne | Send them · majority | 11–7 |
When it costs something
Some choices carry a real financial consequence. Win the vote, and the game takes a fixed percentage of your country's monthly GDP — say 0.5% — and charges or credits it every month for a fixed number of months.