Manchester developer's UK politics game beats Minecraft on App Store charts

Benjamin Brewis, a developer working in Manchester, has built a mobile game that recently climbed higher on Apple's UK paid games chart than Minecraft—a feat made all the more striking by what the game is actually about. No 10: Full Confidence puts players in the role of prime minister, asking them to navigate the chaos of Westminster by making decisions across more than 300 fictional political scenarios, each one handwritten by Brewis himself. The game's sudden popularity suggests that the relentless churn of British politics over the past decade has created an appetite for interactive satire about the very thing that has become almost too absurd to parody.

The core mechanic is elegantly simple: players must balance the moods of four factions—cabinet ministers, backbenchers, the media, and the public—while choosing from three options in each scenario. Upset the wrong group too many times, and your political career ends. The scenarios themselves range from the mundane, like managing GP appointment waiting times, to the deliberately ridiculous. Brewis describes one multi-part storyline in which a dog is released into the House of Lords by a lobbyist during a debate over a vet bill, and the chaos spirals from there. Yet even the farcical scenarios are rooted in real events. Brewis has mined Westminster's recent history for inspiration: the MP who threatened colleagues with a spider, Boris Johnson walking into a refrigerator, the endless parade of crises that have defined the past few years.

When I tested the game myself, playing as a fictional prime minister named Verity Grimshaw, I managed to survive an early crisis involving thousands of A-level students receiving incorrect grades. But within a year and nine months, my tenure ended—brought down, ironically, by a complete loss of press confidence. A cabinet minister had resigned and published a lengthy letter containing the phrase "the PM was warned" four times. When that letter was read aloud on BBC Radio 4, Verity's position became untenable. My final choice to respond directly and address every point did not help. Brewis notes that other players have fared considerably better. One user has managed to stay in office for 1,885 months—157 years—which he wryly observes probably no longer qualifies as democracy.

Brewis began developing the game around December 2025, during what he describes as a moment when "it was all kicking off" with former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and whispers of potential challenges to his leadership were beginning to circulate. The timing was deliberate. "I remember thinking at the time, someone should just start taking the mick out of this," he said. "We've had so many prime ministers—it's funny now." That observation carries weight: five different people have occupied No 10 since 2016, with three serving in just over three years, and one lasting only 49 days. The sheer velocity of that turnover has created a kind of political vertigo that Brewis has transformed into entertainment.

No 10: Full Confidence is not alone in this space. Fantasy Parliament, designed by developer Evan Roberts, operates as a browser-based fantasy league where players draft real-world MPs and score points based on their actual media coverage. The game even includes a Policy Tester that lets players type proposals into a ChatGPT-style AI, which then responds in the voice of different voter archetypes—Coastal Keith, Graduate Gemma, and others. Meanwhile, Black Cannon Games, based in Scarborough, is preparing to release UK Politics Simulator later this year for PC, built on real UK electoral data down to ward level. The emergence of these games suggests that Westminster's recent dysfunction has become not just a source of anxiety but a subject ripe for interactive exploration.

Dr Russell Foster, a lecturer in British and International Politics at King's College London, points to two factors driving this trend: the relentless turnover of prime ministers and the growing presence of politics on social media. Together, they have made Westminster drama both more visible and more absurd—the kind of material that naturally lends itself to game design. Brewis himself does not know whether any sitting politicians have actually played his game, but he has received feedback from friends who work in the civil service. Their assessment of how accurately the game depicts political life was succinct: "It's exactly like this, but worse." That endorsement, delivered with what one imagines was a mixture of humor and exhaustion, may be the highest compliment the game could receive.