Bottleneck is a free browser game about the Hormuz crisis where every choice costs you

Bottleneck is a free browser game that puts you in the role of a fictional maritime coordinator managing the ongoing crisis at the Strait of Hormuz. Journalist and artist Jakub Gornicki built it around real news reports and actual maritime transit data, so the chaos feels grounded rather than invented.

Around 2,000 ships are stuck in and around the strait, and each day you pick a handful that get to pass through. Every call carries a serious trade-off — pay the toll Iran has imposed after claiming authority over the strait, or push back and risk nudging either Iran or the United States closer to a wider war. Let the wrong shipments pile up and you trigger cascading crises: oil price spikes, food and water shortages, and a famine countdown ticking down across multiple countries.

Gornicki is upfront about what the game is actually testing. "The game does not ask whether you are smart enough to solve the crisis," he wrote. "It asks what kind of damage you choose when every option has a cost." There's no winning state — just a series of increasingly painful decisions that illustrate why real-world coordinators dealing with the actual Hormuz disruption have no clean answers either.