Select a node to attack from
Cascade Engineer is a free, open web clone of Jim Rutt's Network Wars, a strategy game available as an iOS app. Network Wars features five factions competing for control of a network graph, with simple rules that produce a surprisingly deep strategy space.
An information cascade occurs when people in a sequence, each holding private knowledge, rationally abandon their own signals in favor of what they observe others doing. The result is a collective decision that appears confident but rests on surprisingly thin evidence.
The canonical demonstration comes from a thought experiment in Chapter 16 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets (Easley & Kleinberg): an urn holds three marbles, either two red and one blue, or two blue and one red. Students draw one marble at a time, peek at it, return it, then publicly announce their guess about the urn's composition. Each student can see the guesses of everyone before them, but not their marbles.
The first student's guess simply reveals their draw. The second student combines two signals. But by the third student, something decisive happens: if the first two both guessed red, the third student, even holding a blue marble, faces a rational calculus that favors red. They suppress their private information and follow the crowd. So does every student after them. The cascade has begun.
The striking result: even when the urn is genuinely majority-blue, there is roughly a 1-in-5 chance the cascade locks onto red. Every subsequent guess reinforces a wrong answer, because the crowd is no longer aggregating independent signals. It is amplifying a thin early lead.
Cascades appear strong but are structurally fragile. They rest on the thinnest possible margin of evidence, often just one or two early signals. A single piece of credible counter-evidence, made public, can shatter a cascade and trigger a new one in the opposite direction. This is why markets crash, why consensus flips overnight, and why technologies that seemed destined to dominate can lose to alternatives in a matter of months.
Cascade Engineer is a strategy game about exactly this dynamic. You control territory on a network graph. Combat outcomes are probabilistic, each engagement a weighted coin flip. Reinforcements flow through your largest connected group. The game is won not through brute force but by understanding how small advantages compound through a network and how a single miscalculation can cascade into structural collapse.
The name is aspirational: to engineer cascades rather than be swept along by them.
Control 24 of 30 nodes to win. You play as RED against four AI factions.